


Translation

by BurningTea



Series: Mother Tongue [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel's True Form, M/M, Memories, Mentions of Past Torture, past canon trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 20:56:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: Summary: When Cas arrives at the Bunker, clearly ill, and keeps having trouble remembering Dean or Sam or English, the brothers have to resort to a spell which paints Cas in sigils in an effort to anchor him to his own memories. The brothers aren’t prepared to experience Cas’ memories for themselves. Through events they thought they knew and ones they didn’t know existed, Sam and Dean will have to face the fact that with the years between them, and even with Dean secretly learning Enochian, they still haven’t fully translated Castiel.  If this works, they will have Cas with them and a whole new understanding, but the full extent of what it means to be Cas might be more than Dean can handle.





	

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to the most awesome of betas and cheer-partners, ExpatGirl. She is an angel in the truest sense (yes, I mean you should rightly tremble in her presence and give her offerings.)
> 
> Cool art by [lostloona](http://xlostloonax.livejournal.com/13969.html).
> 
> Come say hi on tumblr. I'm [humanformdragon](http://humanformdragon.tumblr.com/).

Cas is leaning against the Bunker door. He’s curved over, his forehead touching the metal, and he doesn’t move as Dean adjusts his grip on the grocery bags he’s hauling and takes the steps down to join him.

“Cas?” Dean asks, and it comes out like an actual question, standing in for ‘What are you doing here?’ and ‘Why are you standing like that?’ and ‘Are you okay?’

Cas flinches, his shoulders shifting, but he doesn’t answer.

“Hey!” Dean says. “Cas, come on. I need to get this crap to the kitchen. Sam’s gonna get his hair in a twist if his fancy ice-cream melts.”

Reading the lines of Cas’ body isn’t exactly simple. There’s no beginner’s course on that. He’s been getting more human, settling further into his inherited body, but he’s still not human and he doesn’t, ever, entirely move like one. He didn’t even when he was human, not even when Dean tried to joke off the effect it had on him, seeing Cas behind that counter selling lottery tickets. In theory, they were at least the same species then. Right now, Dean has no clue where to even start reading the guy.

“Come on, Cas,” Dean says, stepping closer and dipping his head in an effort to see Cas’ face. He has a much easier time reading Cas’ eyes. If he can catch them. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Cas’ eyes are closed. He’s leaning against the Bunker door with his eyes closed, and there’s a tightness about his mouth that speaks of pain.

Shit. Dean’s no slouch in the brain department, not when it comes to pulling together clues. But Cas has been coming apart for years, and Dean has no idea how to piece him back together. He needs an idea of what’s happened this time, what chunk of Cas has been torn open or torn off.

Dean turns and sets the bags on a step. Sam’s ice-cream can melt. He reaches out and touches Cas’ arm lightly, just below the elbow. Cas flinches again, pulling away and turning to face Dean. He doesn’t meet Dean’s eyes.

“I…” The word trails off into nothing, leaving Cas silent, the space between them empty.

Dean realises Cas is shaking.

“Okay,” he says, because this is clearly not a time for hashing it all out. “Okay, let’s get you inside.”

He leaves the bags where they are and gets the door open, yelling for Sam as he goes. He hears Sam’s feet heading up the stairs inside in moments. Getting Cas to move is another issue.

When Dean reaches for him again, Cas pulls back, his eyes widening as though he can’t understand why Dean would do that, and Dean pauses, his left hand in the air between them, and tries to work out what could be going on in Cas’ head.

“What’s going on, man?” Dean asks, dropping his voice to a low murmur. There’s something about Cas right now that makes Dean want to be calm reassurance. “You running from something? Are you hurt? If you’re hurt, you’ve gotta tell us.”

Since Lucifer, Dean’s been trying to talk to Cas more, but it’s far from easy. He has an irrational impulse to call his mom, but she’s off finding herself with Jody and Donna, or finding some peace on their joint road-trip at least, and Dean isn’t dropping this on her unless he has to.

Besides, Cas is his issue. Always has been.

“Who are you?” Cas asks.

The last syllable fades into Dean’s shocked silence as Sam arrives, poking his head out through the door and holding onto the opening on either side, his look of curiosity shifting through pleased greeting and right into concerned confusion.

“What’s going on?” Sam asks.

“Cas just asked who I am,” Dean says, not able to lower that fucking hand where it still sits in the air.

He sees Sam’s eyes flash with worry, and doesn’t add that Cas said the words in Enochian.

“He what?” Sam asks.

Dean heaves a breath. He doesn’t want to say it again. No point, in any case. Not like it’ll make more sense.

“Well, get him inside,” Sam says, rolling right into the practicalities. “We don’t need an angel having a meltdown out here. Cas? You going to come inside?”

Cas’ gaze shifts to Sam, and he narrows his eyes. Dean sees the guy’s hand twitch a moment before the angel blade drops into it, and he shoves himself in between Cas and his brother.

“Cas!”

Cas stops. He looks at Dean, and down at his hand, and back again. Something on his face shifts. It’s still confusion, but it’s got a different texture.

“Dean?” Cas asks.

“Yeah,” Dean says, not daring to relax from his stance just yet. “Yeah. You’re scaring me, buddy.”

“I’m sorry,” Cas says, in English this time. “That wasn’t my intention.”

Dean feels Sam’s hand on his shoulder and his brother slips past, picking up the bags Dean dropped.

“We should all get inside,” Sam says, as though Cas didn’t just have some weird episode in front of them. “Come on.”

Cas sways a little as he follows Sam, but he still seems to know who they are as they settle in the library. Sam takes the bags to the kitchen and Dean grabs that gray blanket he gave Cas before, wrapping it around his friend’s shoulders and wishing it felt in any way useful. He tries to ignore the confused pinch to Cas’ brow.

“What’s up?” he asks, once he’s taken his own seat.

He almost expects Cas to deny there’s a problem, or brush it off as less important than it seems. Cas is tough like that. Independent. He never likes to rely on Sam or Dean more than he has to.

Cas shakes his head.

“Can I stay here?” he asks. “I-”

He breaks off as a cough shakes him, and Dean is on his feet and next to Cas at once. Images of other times Cas has been unwell flit through his mind. He wishes this feeling of helplessness was just a memory.

“Is this a spell?” he asks. “Did you go up against a witch? Or is it your Grace?”

Cas shakes his head again, but Dean doesn’t know whether it’s an answer. Cas’s eyes are glazed and he’s shaking.

“I’m tired,” Cas eventually gets out. “I just need to rest…for a minute.”

The guy’s visibly slumping, and his eyes aren’t all the way open.

“You look wiped,” Dean says.

Cas is an angel. He only needs to sleep when he’s low on Grace. Or out of it. Then again, Cas just keeps turning up new ways he can get screwed over, so there’s no real way of telling what this is. And Dean has no solid idea how to help.

“Let’s get you into bed,” he says, because it might be pointless but at least it’s something he can pretend will do some good.

******************************

By the time Dean has Cas in bed, the angel’s slipped in and out of his native language several more times, and lost Dean’s name twice. Each time, Dean calms him and steadies him until his eyes clear, but Cas is way beyond explaining what’s going on. That much is obvious..

Maybe after some sleep, Dean thinks, they can get on the same page, work out what to do.

He pulls the covers up over Cas’ shoulders and tucks him in, trying not to think how wrong this feels.

“Thank-you, Dean,” Cas says, and the shudder in his body is audible in his words.

“No problem, Cas,” Dean says. He could say more, but Cas’ eyes are already drooping, and keeping him up seems cruel.

As Dean closes the door, he hears Cas thank him again, this time in Enochian, and when Dean gets back to his own room he goes to the chest in the corner and throws open the lid. Under a few cardboard boxes he finds the cracked leather covers and yellowed paper of books he’s taken from all around the Bunker. Hell, he’s taken them from all around the country, whenever he’s come across one. The dry-letter scent of them rises and Dean pushes back the sense-memory of Bobby’s study. He needs to focus on the present, not the past. In here, he might find something useful.

He hasn’t been able to keep Cas with him, but he’s been able to gather together a pile of books on angels.

These are the books Sam doesn’t know about, the ones that aren’t in standard Enochian, the ones that he’s pored over for years as he’s tried to work out Cas’ native tongue. These books aren’t just in the language of the angels: they’re in the specific language of the Seraphs.

He hasn’t let himself think too closely on why he’s never told either Sam or Cas about them.

Now, he pulls all of the books out and sits down to read.

********************

The first time Dean noticed it, years ago, he almost asked Cas to translate, but the alien words curling around Cas’ tongue hadn’t been meant for Dean. They’d been quiet, an aside, spoken only for Cas himself, and it felt like asking would be an intrusion. And they were deep in the Apocalypse, after all. Dean wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Cas had to say about the Winchesters’ choices, not when what he’d said in English had already been so displeased.

Later, Dean stared into the dark of Bobby’s spare room, mulling over the sounds, turning them round in his head and trying to get a sense of their shape. Enochian was strange: electric and heavy and ocean deep. It was hard to pin down on a page, like some part of it was alive and gave up the fight when forced into ink.

Like everything about Cas back then, Dean didn’t understand it, the matter or the meaning.

Sam understood some, but whenever he asked Cas for a translation there’d be some nuance that slipped away. Cas had a tendency to sigh and rework the translation, a faint frown marring his brow as he offered words of English. Dean thought it was irritation at Sam’s lack of skill, but perhaps Cas just disliked stripping his mother tongue of its shades, its textures.

He thought of asking Cas to teach him, but the guy was off searching for God so much, and there were other concerns.

It was after Purgatory that Dean thought about it again.

From finding Cas until they reached the portal the tramp of Cas’ feet through forest undergrowth was accompanied by words that danced at the edge of Dean’s hearing. He caught a look from Benny, a time or two, that told him the vampire had heard Cas’ muttering, but the look contained extra layers of meaning that Dean was no closer to understanding than he was to knowing what Cas was saying.

After Purgatory, Dean had to face the fact there was a lot he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand why his body felt bruised, even when he hadn’t been in a fight. He didn’t understand why the world was too large, too bright, too much, or why he longed for brown and black and red, washed out and pure. He didn’t understand why being back with Sam wasn’t the same sense of coming home it used to be.

On that long list of things Dean didn’t understand was how Sam could not look for him. Sam explained. It just didn’t translate in Dean’s head, leaving spaces where there used to be a sense of connection.

He set about understanding Enochian instead.

They were on a case when he stumbled across the first book, a tiny thing that looked like someone’s diary from at least two hundred years back. It spelled out a few words Dean half thought he recognized. He slipped it into his pocket when no-one was looking. His first real words of Cas’ dialect were pieced together in dim motel rooms and over-bright diners: liminal spaces where Dean felt a little less emptied out by the gaps inside him.

Dean stuffed those spaces with harsh syllables, rolling off his tongue like jagged rocks and crashing without meaning into the world. It was weeks before he could string a sentence together. When he managed it, he delivered it to an empty room. His notes were packed away before Sam came back from his run.

When he saw Cas, fleeting glimpses that stole any words from Dean’s brain, he told himself it was guilt, it was stress, it was spending too much time trying to fit the words of angels into his human mouth. Sam spoke of grief, and Dean had no words for that, either.

A storm swept Cas back. Dean opened his mouth to tell Cas he looked better cleaned up, but it stuck in his throat. It was worry the phrase would come out wrong. That’s all it was. Still, he missed his window, and relief welled up. Would have been a cheesy thing to do. Better to wait and let Cas know he’d been studying another time, when the guy hadn’t just blown in from another dimension without warning.

He hadn’t found the right time before they went after Crowley, looking for Kevin and the tablet, and Cas played the hero by zapping into the room alone. Dean had a slashing word in Enochian lined up on his tongue as he burst through the door, but the sight of Cas on the floor knocked it back down.

As he helped Cas up, the angel muttered something in his native tongue and Dean only got away without being called on his shocked look because Cas was still too unsteady to focus. Dean understood almost everything Cas said. It helped that Dean always learned the swear-words first. He shouldn’t be so surprised that Cas would swear, really, and being knocked on his ass was a good reason to indulge in it. Still, and even after seeing Cas strategize, after seeing Cas plan, he was taken aback by how…creative it was. Even Crowley couldn’t possibly like the suggestion. Not unless the two of them had got up to a lot more during the war with Raphael than Dean had suspected.

The shock made him miss the beat when he should have laughed, told Cas he was on to him and his dirty mind, let him know Dean got at least some of Cas’ language. The next case was on them before he realised. Cas’ conversation in English was enough to make Dean wish he didn’t understand his own language, not when words like ‘kill myself’ came up. After that, Cas washed away from him again.

Finding Alfie was an exercise in frustration, Cas right next to him but saying nothing, and disappearing into a blank space with blood in his eye. Dean did his best to persuade himself Cas would call if there was real trouble, did his best to imagine the guy had just gone back to flitting around and helping people. After a few weeks, it became easier to believe it.

The bunker turned out to have a shelf dedicated to Enochian, to musings on angel physiology and customs and culture. Dean entertained himself for a whole evening reading out the weirdest guesses on angelic social interactions to Sam, insisting they make a top ten to try out on Cas whenever he turned up again. Sam snorted and insisted most, if not all, of the books must be more fiction than the bible, and they already knew how Cas felt about the accuracy of that.

Dean kept a few of the books to take to his room.

By the time he saw Cas again, he felt ‘fluent’ might not be an accurate description of his skills, but it was a lot closer than it had been. Which is how he could understand what Cas was saying in the middle of attacking. It was how he knew Cas was pleading with someone, that Dean was right and this was not his Cas. The angel was so far gone he didn’t seem to realise that Dean was speaking to him in Enochian, throwing the words out in defence as he knelt on the floor, hoping Cas’ mother tongue would get through. Either it worked, or Cas just couldn’t bring himself to kill Dean.

Dean put the books away after that, anger and pain and worry bubbling in his gut. If Cas didn’t want to speak to him, it didn’t matter what language Dean knew.

It didn’t mean he forgot.

After the trials, after the angels fell, after Abaddon and the Mark and the Darkness and everything else, Dean still hasn’t told Cas that how much he understands. He still hasn’t told Sam.

And now he has Cas, bedraggled and hungry and shivering, bundled up in blankets in a spare bed, and Dean is scared this might be the time Cas slips away for good.

In the absence of being able to tell Cas, finally, that he’s learned at least a chunk of his language, Dean pores over books and promises himself he’ll talk to Cas properly when this crisis is over.

********************

Cas has to be roused from his bed the next morning, his shivering only a little better than it was. Dean has him sit up and builds him a nest of extra pillows and blankets. Cas’ eyes are bright, feverish, and he flinches away when Dean sets his hand against Cas’ forehead.

“You’re hot, man,” he says. “Burning up.”

Cas laughs, a small, bitter thing that makes Dean want to hug him or shake him or something, and Dean isn’t sure if Cas knows he’s slipped into his own language. It rattles Dean enough that it takes a moment to translate Cas’ muttered words, delivered to his own hands over the blankets.

“Burning One,” Cas tells his hands, his lip twisting. “Fire’s gone cold.”

He looks up at Dean, confusion crossing his face, and switches to English.

“Why can’t I get warm?” he asks. “I don’t like being cold.”

Dean gets him three more blankets and a hot water bottle, and decides Cas is too ill to cope with explaining what he meant just then. It can wait until he isn’t vibrating with the need to get warm.

Besides, he hasn’t seemed able to tell Dean what’s going on with him up until now.

When Cas is asleep, Dean joins Sam in the library, rubbing his face and sighing as he sits down.

“How is he?” Sam asks, glancing up from a book.

Dean shrugs. “Not sure. Hey, Sam? What’s it mean if an angel says his fire’s gone cold? You think he’s human again?”

“Do you want him to be?” There’s something too careful behind Sam’s words.

“What? No. No, of course not.” Does he? Cas as a human couldn’t just flit off, could taste food and enjoy a beer. Hell, Cas as a human was an adorable drunk. Still… “He’s not human, Sam. Not good for him. You didn’t see him in Rexford.”

“You didn’t tell me a lot about it,” Sam says. “Cas was really that badly?”

Dean tips his head to the side, as though that will give him a better angle on his own thoughts, his own memories.

“I suppose…he was doing okay, sort of. He’d got a job. Wasn’t much, but he seemed proud of it. It was just…” He trails off, lifting a hand and letting it drift back down as he tries to catch at the way seeing Cas back then hit him. “It was weird, seeing him stack shelves and shit.”

“But you didn’t bring him back with you,” Sam points out. There’s no accusation in the words, but that could be because there’s not much of anything. Sam can be scarily good at blanking emotion from what he says.

“No.” He didn’t take Cas to an apartment, either. That should have rung a few more warning bells, now he thinks of it. Wherever Cas was staying, he didn’t want Dean to see it. “So, do you think he’s human or not? He hasn’t exactly been making a lot of sense.”

Sam looks to be thinking about it, the finger keeping his place in the book.

“He’s sick. He’s been sleeping. He eaten anything?”

“No. Should probably check on that.” And liquids. “Shit, Sammy, I am not used to Cas needing to heal.”

“Yeah, he’s normally managed that out of sight, hasn’t he? You know, he slept back when his Grace was going out, but he was still an angel. And he pretty much went to ground after Rowena’s spell. I think we’re just going to have to do what we can for him.” And that doesn’t sound like they’re waiting for him to die at all. “We’ll have to ask him when he’s with it enough to tell us.”

“Yeah, well, who knows when that’ll be?”

Cas has only managed those few minutes of being lucid since he arrived, and Dean isn’t entirely sure how clear-headed the angel was then. Without being able to ask the source, they have to go with what’s written down.

But Dean doesn’t find anything in the books Sam has out, and he’s found nothing in the ones in his room, and pretty soon he gets up to make Cas something to drink. There are a bunch of herbal teas kicking about and he settles on something that claims to be soothing and healing. It smells a lot like grass.

When Dean nudges open Cas’ door he finds his friend sitting up, hugging his own knees. He looks awful.

“Hey, Cas. Come on. I brought you something to drink. Hey, you with me, man?”

Cas looks at him, or near him, but his eyes are still glassy and there doesn’t look to be a lot going on in his head. Dean has to wrap Cas’ hands around the mug and help him keep it steady.

“Come on. Just drink a bit more.” Dean guides Cas’ hands, adding pressure to get him to lift the mug. If he does need liquid, if he’s human, or fading, then it has to help. If not… Well, at least it’s something Dean can do. “That better?”

The click of the mug touching down on the bedside table rings through the room. Cas winces. His eyes, already narrowed, become little more than slits.

“You got a headache? Will painkillers help?”

Dean doesn’t know why he keeps asking questions. He’s getting no answers. Not that he should be surprised by that. Cas has never been big on answers. Not ones Dean can understand.

He gets Cas some painkillers anyway, making him take more of the now-cold tea with them. Cas turns his head away at first, calls Dean cruel. Dean pretends to himself he hasn’t understood and Cas lets himself be coaxed into taking the pills. Dean presses the last one between Cas’ lips, the pad of his finger resting against the angel’s lower lip. If he is still an angel.

The brief touch of Cas’ tongue against Dean’s fingertip is something else he pretends he doesn’t notice. After all, it means less than Cas’ words.

He doesn’t leave the room until Cas is sleeping again, his forehead still creased in what has to be pain. Dean wishes he knew the words to soothe his friend, but until he knows what Cas is facing here, he doesn’t know what to say.

Back in the library, Sam sits with one of the books on angels open in front of him, his back hunched as he peers down at it. He gestures Dean over and glances up at him, his eyes heavy with something Dean can’t read.

“What did you find?” Dean asks. He sinks down into the chair next to Sam, his body angled towards his brother and that book. “Is it bad?”

Sam sits back, his long frame sprawled on the chair, and sighs.

“Hard to say. This section is all about fire. Heavenly fire. It’s more metaphor than anything, and it’s probably as mangled as everything else we’ve read about angels, but the way this has it, if an angel burns cold it means one of two things.”

Dean waits. He lacks the power to do anything else.

“He could still be human,” Sam says. “He might just have the ‘flu. We can nurse him through that.”

Cold slithers down Dean’s spine. His hands clench into a fist on the table.

“What else could it be?”

Sam closes his eyes. When he opens them, there’s too much sympathy in his eyes, too much resignation.

“If he’s still an angel, and feels his fire’s cold, then, like I said, one of two things.” He shifts in his chair, pain settling on his face. “He’s either dying or he’s been cut off by God.”

*************************

Cas doesn’t wake for hours. Dean knows, because Dean sits in a chair by Cas’ bed and waits. He needs to know what they’re facing. From everything Sam can find, there’s nothing to be done for an angel who burns cold. Lucifer was the only one to survive it, and Sam shared his body with the guy, said the way Lucifer was twisted was something worse than being dead.

Hell, Cas has shared his body with Lucifer, and Dean still isn’t sure the angel’s recovered from that. Chuck didn’t seem upset with Castiel for hosting Lucifer, but he didn’t seem to pay Cas much attention at all. Hard to say whether Cas’ dad was ignoring him because he’d cut him off. It digs at those hollow, aching spaces in Dean to think Cas might not have told them if that’s the case.

It’s bad enough seeing Cas twisted up with the sheets, without thinking of worse going on inside his head.

When Cas opens his eyes this time, Dean sits forward in his chair, his hands braced on the arms, and speaks into the thick silence between them.

“Cas? You know where you are?”

“Dean?” His voice cracks on the word. The note of confusion hurts.

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me, buddy. You’re in your room at the bunker. Okay? You’ve been pretty out of it. How are you feeling now?”

The rasp of Cas’ words is almost enough for Dean to tell the guy to stop trying, for him to offer to get more painkillers and a warm drink instead, but Cas’ jaw is tense. The fever in his eyes is joined by the fixed look that says Cas will get through his task, and if that task is talking, Dean knows stopping him will only hurt worse. Cas needs to complete his missions, however small. However little Dean understands them.

“I’m cold,” Cas says. “I…I’ve never been so cold. Not even when I was human, when I had no...” A muscle in his jaw clenches. He doesn’t look at Dean. “When I took Theo’s Grace, I thought at least I wouldn’t have to be cold again.”

“At least?” Dean leaves the chair, goes to sit on the edge of the bed. He tries to catch Cas’ eye. “What do you mean, at least? What did you think would happen?”

Shame or self-recrimination or something of a similar shade colors Cas’ words.

“Taking another’s Grace, it’s unspeakable. I knew it would poison me.” He stops, swallows. It seems to hurt him. “I had to warn you about Ezekiel being dead.”

“But you knew it would hurt you?” Dean ducks his head, catches the look in Cas’ eye. “Kill you? What the fuck, Cas.”  
It’s not that Dean thought Cas was fine with that foreign Grace. He still remembers the gutpunch moment of Metatron dropping knowledge Cas’ impending death from on high. He just didn’t realize that Cas took the Grace knowing it would happen. It changes it, shades it in a different light.

Even though Dean’s words are more despairing than angry, Cas flinches. It’s a tiny movement. It still cuts.

“I had to warn you,” he says again, the words stubborn.

“Fine. You had to warn me,” Dean says, because there’s no point arguing with Cas once he decides something’s his mission, and even less point than that trying to change something that’s so far in the past. “You never told me you knew it would kill you.”

“You had enough to deal with.”

Cas finishes the sentence on a rasp, his breath stuttering into a cough. Dean helps him sit up, braces Cas with an arm around his shoulders as the angel’s chest spasms. Once it’s done, Dean stays where he is.

“Still, Cas,” Dean says, reading in the tense line of his friend against him that the guy hasn’t heard him right, “you don’t have to use yourself up to save us.”

He doesn’t want Cas to do something just as self-destructive again, even if it means seeing through some task he feels he has.

“Cas, tell me you heard me, man. Tell me you won’t do something like that again. Cas?”

Silence. Silence except for the grating sound of Cas’ breath, which seems to have gotten worse overnight.

“Look, just… at least tell me how to help you.” Dean’s asked questions like this before, but with Cas held by his side instead of at the end of a phone line, with him weak and pale and ill, it seems more loaded. Words can be weapons, even if wielded by friends. “Cas, just tell me if you’re human.”

A jerk of the head, more reflex by the look of it than anything else, and then Cas looks up, slowly, by inches, until he almost meets Dean’s eyes.

“No,” he manages. “No, I’m not… I was never really human, Dean. Not really. But I...I don’t know what I’ll be when this has run its course.”

His throat works, and Dean fights down the urge to soothe a hand across Cas’ forehead, along his arm. Cas is stripped right down to boxers and Dean’s all too aware of his skin against Dean’s shirt. Still, there’s still too much space between them, that thick, loaded barrier that keeps Dean from being as close as he wants to be with his friend.

“How do you mean?” Dean asks. “What’s going on with you?”

Those are tears in Cas’ eyes.

“I’m losing myself,” he says, and another coughing fit takes away anything else he has to say.

***************************

“What the hell does that even mean?” Dean asks, pacing around the table in the library, his hands in his own hair as he tries not to lose it completely. Sweeping everything off the table and onto the floor isn’t going to help. Doesn’t mean he isn’t tempted.

“Dean, you need to calm down,” Sam says from his seat in front of the books. “He really didn’t say anything else?”

“No. He shut me out. Wouldn’t say anything. Wouldn’t even tell me if he needed to eat.”

Cas faded into something distant in front of Dean’s eyes, the vast gap between them all too clear to say Cas was pressed right against him. Dean stopped asking when Cas dropped his eyes, turned his head away. He stopped speaking at all when Cas curled into Dean’s side, pushing his face into the meat of Dean’s chest. If Cas wouldn’t tell him anything useful, he could at least hold his friend. He stayed until Cas fell asleep.

“Maybe you should go and ask again.” Sam sounds so reasonable. The state of his hair says he’s been running his hands through it.

“Yeah. I’ll get right on that. I’m sure a few minutes’ nap will have changed his mind completely.”

But it might. For all the time he’s spent learning Cas’ language in secret, Dean’s never learned the tides of Cas’ mind. Not really. Sometimes, it feels like he knows Cas, knows him as fully and completely as he knows Sam, or knows himself. Other times… Cas is a different species, a different creature altogether from Dean and his flesh-bound understanding. All he will ever manage of Cas is a translation, and something will always be lost.

“Look, he’s sleeping. He says he’s not human, but he’s sleeping. So it’s one of the other things. You got anything on how to deal with either of those?”

Now it’s Sam who isn’t meeting his eyes. Sam has his hands resting on the book and he turns them so his palms are up, his fingers splayed out.

“Dean, it doesn’t say what’s killing the angel if it’s cold, just that burning cold is a sign of dying. There’s no mention of cause or cure. And as for being the other thing? It only says how to help the angel end its suffering. Far as I can make out, it doesn’t happen often, and it’s never ended well.”

“We aren’t giving up on him,” Dean says, pointing his finger at Sam. “If God’s cut him off, if Chuck’s way of paying Cas for all that shit he’s been dragged through is to fucking cut him off, we’ll get him through it. You said it yourself: Lucifer lived.”

“You really think Cas wants to be like Lucifer?” Sam asks.

“Far as most of Heaven’s concerned, he already is,” Dean says, but he knows that isn’t what Sam means, and he has the edge of an idea that Cas hates the way his own kind see him. “We’re not turning our backs on him.”

It’s another of those things Cas only lets slip in bits and pieces, another issue where Dean knows he isn’t working it all out in full.

“Of course we aren’t.” Sam sounds disgusted. “What I’m saying is I haven’t found anything close to an answer yet. I still have a few more books to go through, but not all of them even agree on the basics. Hell, one of them says angels are behemoths with claws and poisoned fangs and another one says they grow out of fairies, so we can’t rely on everything they say being accurate.”

“Yeah, Cas with poisoned fangs is not something we need,” Dean says. “He snaps enough as it is.”

He tries a smile, but it fights him, leaving something pasty and weak on his lips.

Sam frowns and nods, his head still angled so he must be looking at his own hands.

“Yeah. Listen, I’ll keep looking. If we have nothing once I’ve gone through these, we’ll get someone who can help us. There has to be someone who knows about this and will speak to us. You just keep an eye on Cas. See if you can get him to talk to you.”

“Maybe you should try. The two of you got pretty close when I was… Well. You got pretty close.”

“Yeah.” Sam makes no move to leave his chair. “If you don’t get anywhere, I can go and talk to him. I’d better get back to it.”

He makes no mention of the fact that Dean could join in with the reading.

“You done with these?” Dean asks, pointing at the pile closer to him. As Sam’s nod, he pulls the top one across and flips it open. “You translated all the Enochian?”

“Yeah. Pretty dense stuff. Cas once called it flowery. Can’t say I see the beauty in it, myself.”

“I’ll have a look. Might as well. Maybe there’s a line a second pair of eyes can have a go at. You got your notes?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “But, Dean, if I haven’t spotted anything-“

“I might see something you haven’t,” Dean says, pulling the first book towards him. “I…”

At this point, not telling Sam about the Enochian is a habit more than anything, a secret Dean’s managed to hold on to that isn’t deadly and isn’t shameful, and maybe part of him has come to treasure that. It’s not like most of his secrets are so benign.

He hasn’t got a reason for keeping it from Sam anymore.

“Listen,” he says, flicking a glance at Sam, “I, er, I’ve been teaching myself Enochian. I’m actually pretty good. So, yeah.”

Sam’s eyebrows lift, and he opens his mouth a couple of times before getting anything out.

“You speak Enochian?” he asks. “What, as in speak it speak it?”

“No, as in I can ask the way to the train station or order a beer,” Dean says. Snaps. “Come on, Sam. I’m not stupid.”

Sam’s expression changes and he holds up his hands, palms open.

“Hey, I know that,” he says. “I know. How well do you know it?”

Dean shrugs, looking away.

“Well enough,” he says. “I’ve been collecting books when I find them. Got some from Bobby’s old stash a while back.”

“And you never said,” Sam says, but he goes on before Dean has to justify it. “Okay. So, you might actually be better off reading these, then. How about you take a look and I’ll be on Cas duty for a while.”

Sam pats Dean on the shoulder as they change places, and Dean wonders if Sam has any idea what it means that Dean wanted to speak Cas’ language when he’s never managed to fully learn Latin.

He pushes that aside for now and turns to the volumes Sam’s already trawled through, feeling a twinge of guilt when he realizes how long it’s taken Sam to read something Dean can manage more or less right off.

There’s nothing in the books. It takes Dean a few hours, but he has to admit it at last. There is nothing more useful in any of these books than he found in the ones from his room.

Dean sits with the last book shut on his lap, fingers folded around the bound pages, and resents every moment he’s spent learning the language of the angels. The language of Cas. What good does it do if it can’t find him a way to help his best friend? The symbols might as well be pretty patterns, doodles instead of words.

“Nothing new in the books?” Sam asks, and Dean looks up to see his brother standing in the doorway with a glass of water. “It’s for Cas,” Sam says. “He says he’s thirsty.”

“Right,” Dean says. “Well, no. I can’t find anything you’ve missed that’ll help. And I haven’t found anything in any other books I’ve got. Face it, we’ve got nothing.”

“I’ve put out a call for any more books on angel lore,” Sam says, “but so far no-one has anything. I’m sure Bobby had some more, but I haven’t seen them since we went to face Dick.”

Dean has no idea which books Sam means. So much of what he felt that year was muted, filtered through some gray barrier that drained everything, with that spike of colour when he’d found Cas, when he’d thought they were due a win. He’d been paying no attention to where Bobby’s books went, not by the time he’d talked Cas into helping them fight, had let Bobby go for good and had gone to Purgatory himself so soon after. Purgatory hadn’t been a place for books, and it had seemed foolish to care about them one way or another when he’d spent a year writing essays in blood across that whole, washed-out landscape.

“Couldn’t tell you where they are,” Dean says. “Weren’t they at the cabin?”

“Not by the time you came back,” Sam says.

“So, not much chance they’ll show, then. I’m going to take Cas his water. You…you just keep looking.”

Sam doesn’t argue when Dean stands and takes the water from his hands, and Dean walks out before Sam can ask him where to look.

****************************

It’s the next morning when he finds the journal. It’s tucked up inside Cas’ coat, shoved into a pocket as though it’s worthless, battered and tattered and smudged, but Dean sees the symbol scratched onto the front. A warding. A protection. No way would Cas bother with putting that on something worthless.

Cas is out cold again, and so far Dean hasn’t been able to get anything else out of him. In the absence of Cas himself, maybe Dean can get something from Cas’ journal.

Dean isn’t sure what he was expecting. Something from Cas’ time as a human, perhaps, about what he had to learn on his own, the hard way, with no roadmap or guide book. Or maybe notes from earlier, when Cas was first been getting to know the Winchesters and had been puzzled and irritated by Dean most times they met.

He doesn’t expect it to be recent, from just a week ago, the first page dated the previous Monday.

He doesn’t expect the first word to be his own name.

‘Dean’

It’s written in English, deep black against the cream paper, a blot of ink on the edge of the ‘D’ as though the pen rested there for a while.

He should read it. It’s for him. But he lets his eyes skip over the rest of the page, noting only that it’s letters he knows, and turns the page. And the next. And the next. The rest of the journal is in Enochian. And not in any Enochian. It’s in the dialect Dean’s come to understand is Cas’ native tongue, not the one kept for spells and proclamations. Cas still doesn’t know Dean understands that. Cas doesn’t mean for Dean to read it.

He traces a symbol with his forefinger, something hooked and jagged. It’s not one he knows, but he’s developed enough of a sense for the patterns of this language to get that it’s probably not happy, not singing the joys. Then again, Cas’ life has hardly been full of joys to sing about lately.

Footsteps behind him warn him Sam’s there before he speaks, his tone worried.

“What’ve you got?” Sam asks.

“Some notebook,” Dean says. “I think it might be a journal. Something like that.”

“Cas’?”

Sam comes closer, his presence solid and real behind Dean, and there’s a split second where Dean wants to pull the journal away from Sam. Instead, he angles it so Sam can see it more clearly.

“Yeah. It’s his handwriting.”

Dean’s stared at the x-ray image of his own chest often enough, tracing over Cas’ sigils with his forefinger. Cas inscribed meaning on Dean’s ribs. There’s something symbolic in that, he thinks. He hasn’t decided what.

“What’s it say?”

“Don’t know yet.” Dean stops, licks his lips. He needs a drink. “Most of it’s in Enochian. There’s… There’s a note to me in the front.”

If Dean thought Sam might wonder why the note is only to Dean, there’s no sign of it in Sam’s answer.

“You read it, yet?” he asks, as though not being included is so expected it’s not worth mentioning.

Dean shakes his head.

“Okay,” Sam says, after a pause. “You going to? You can read it, right?”

That should be an easy question. Should be. And Dean’s grateful that Sam’s not wanting answers on why Dean kept the Enochian quiet.

“Look, I found a few more books on angels, right down in those rooms with the maps,” Sam says. “I’m going to get started on them. You should work on that, let me know if there’s anything in it we need.” He hesitates, pulling a face Dean can’t read, and goes on. “And I’ll call you if I get stuck on a translation.”

And he’s gone.

The dialect Cas uses is harder than standard Enochian, the kind Dean’s come to understand is used in spells and formal communication, but Dean’s as close to fluent as he’s likely to get without Cas helping him.

He still doesn’t know why he’s failed to tell Cas. Somehow, they keep getting their lines of communication crossed.

It takes a tumbler of whiskey before Dean can bring himself to follow Sam’s advice, taking the journal with him to his own room and sitting with his back against the headboard.

Dean takes a breath, swallows the last of the drink, and opens the journal, turning to that first page.

 

‘Dean,

I don’t know if this will work, or how much time I’ll have before I know. I’m not clear on whether I’ll even reach you, or what state I’ll be in if I do, so I’m writing this to let you know if I had any other choice I would have waited.

My Grace has been damaged too much by recent events. By the last few years. It’s been corrupted to the point it can’t recover on its own, something I only became aware of last night. I’m afraid I’

The next few words are crossed out, unreadable, and the message picks up again on the next line.

‘Without healing, I’ll die. Perhaps it’s just my time, but I find I’m selfish and don’t want to go without seeing you and Sam again. So, I’m attempting the only cure I know of which might work. It’s something I got from Naomi, something which I don’t think has ever been tried by a single angel on itself, and I’m not sure of the outcome.

One thing which will likely happen is I’ll forget. Everything. So, I’m going to record some of my memories and knowledge in here, in the hopes it might trigger my memories if I survive this.

I’ll be fairly surprised if I do. I’m sorry for bringing you this burden.

Your friend,

Castiel’

 

Time feels stretched, elastic and waiting, and Dean can’t do anything but stare blankly at the page in front of him. Cas’ words feel to be bouncing around just inside his skull, not sinking in any further than the surface, and the air around Dean is wrong. Brittle. Ready to shatter.

Cas thinks he’s dying. Cas has dragged himself here after using some spell or process or fucking who-knows-what that he got from Naomi, and…

It’s not the first time Cas has pulled some stupid, destructive crap, and fuck but Dean wants to shake the bastard. He wants Cas to stop doing this, to stop dropping these bombshells when it’s too late to do anything to help.

Except… Except Cas is here, and he’s said there’s a chance he’ll make it through, and Dean and Sam have a load of books: they have access to this whole bunker full of magic and spells and records. There has to be something Dean can do to increase Cas’ chances.  
Time snaps back and Dean slides from the bed, striding from the room and through to the library, where he finds Sam bowed over a book that looks like it came from Harry Potter. His brother looks up at him with a raised eyebrow, and Dean throws the journal on the table, the thud scoring a line across the space.

“Cas’ Grace is damaged. It’s killing him,” Dean says, and pushes on as Sam’s eyes widen. “He’s used some cure he isn’t sure will work.”

“Why didn’t he wait to get here?” Sam asks, glancing at the journal but not reaching for it.

“No time.” The words taste sour in Dean’s mouth. “And even if it works, he thinks he might forget us. Forget everything. I’m going to see if I can talk to him, find out more. You get looking for anything to heal an angel’s Grace. Or stop their memories from washing away. Something.”

And Dean leaves before Sam has time to ask more questions.

In Cas’ room, the angel lies with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, and Dean hesitates before he crosses to the chair at the side of the bed and sits down.

“Hey,” he says, and watches as Cas’ eyes snap open. Not asleep, then. “You okay? Know who I am?”

Cas frowns, a faint crease of his brow, and Dean waits.

“I know you,” Cas says. It’s in English this time, but it’s hesitant. Slow. Like Cas is having to translate each word as he says it. “You’re Dean Winchester.”

There’s something jarring about hearing such formality from Cas, but Dean hangs on to the fact the guy knows him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I am. Can you tell me what cure you used, Cas? Sam and me, we’re looking for a way to help you through this, but I need to know more.”

“Cure?” Cas narrows his eyes, and it could look amusing with the blankets pulled right up to his chin, but it doesn’t. “What cure? Where am I?” There’s a note of panic there, now. “What have you done to my wings?”

“Your wings?” Dean asks, even as his heart jolts. Cas knows his name, but he doesn’t know him. Not really.

“They hurt,” Cas says. “They…”

He stops, shakes his head, tries to sit up.

Dean has to catch at him to keep him from collapsing, and he ends up holding Cas up, sitting behind him with Cas’ back to Dean’s chest. He feels the angel wince, hears him hiss.

“That your wings?” Dean asks, because Cas hasn’t reacted that way before.

With his jaw tight, Cas nods. His hands, free of the blankets now, grip at Dean’s arm across Cas’ chest. It’s perhaps a good thing Cas is weak right now, because he digs his fingers in, pressing on bone. Dean doesn’t think it’s an attempt to hurt him. It feels more like Cas needs to hold on to something for himself.

Dean doesn’t know what to say. Cas has mentioned missing his wings, but it’s sounded wistful, like they’ve just…gone, like some old trinket he’s set down someplace and forgotten to pick up. And it’s not like Dean’s got a mental blueprint of Cas having wings. The dude looks human. But maybe…maybe Cas just thought he couldn’t talk about it, or didn’t want to.

“How much do they hurt?” Dean asks, knowing he sounds gruff.

Cas squeezes his eyes shut and speaks through stiff lips.

“They feel like they’ve been flayed.”

Which…shit. Dean knows what it feels like, being flayed. It’s one of many memories he’d love to lose from Hell. Still, he wasn’t in his actual body then, and pain, though real, didn’t have quite the same texture, the same weight, as it does in his real body. He doesn’t know where Cas falls on that line.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” Dean says, because he has no idea what he can say that will mean a damn. “Does anything else hurt?”

Cas is shivering again, trembling in Dean’s arms, and it isn’t a surprise when he whispers.

“I’m cold.”

Dean doesn’t think Cas just means his mortal body.

“You said your Grace was damaged. Poisoned,” Dean says. “Do you remember that? Do you remember writing that down?”

Cas shakes his head again, a half move that stops and changes to a slow nod, his chin pressing into Dean’s forearm.

“Yes,” he says, slowly. “Yes, I… I wrote that… Dean?”

“I’m here,” Dean says. “I’m right here. Can you tell me what you used? What can we do to help you pull through this with your head in one piece?”

Cas is still, so still that Dean worries he’s shut down, but in the quiet of the room he can hear Cas’ breathing. Angels aren’t meant to breathe, but Cas forgot that somewhere along the way.

“I…I don’t…” Cas says at last.

“You don’t what, Cas?”

“I don’t want to forget,” Cas says. The next words aren’t in English, the weight of Enochian thrumming into the room. “I don’t want to forget you. I don’t want to forget myself.”

“Then tell me what we can do,” Dean says. “Come on. There has to be something, some way to help your memories stick. You said you were writing them in that journal, to prompt yourself. Can we add to that?”

“You found my journal,” Cas says. He sounds dazed, a little disappointed. “You weren’t supposed to find that yet.”

A chill sweeps through Dean. He refuses to admit what Cas means, because it isn’t going to come to that. It isn’t.

“Just tell me,” he says.

“The, um, the memories. I can…if I have an anchor, and the memories are tied to it, then it might help. Perhaps. Naomi, she sometimes used an anchor to keep the parts of my mind she wanted to preserve from being stripped away.”

He says that last part so factually, as though he’s reporting how a car had its engine tuned, and Dean feels a muscle in his jaw clench.

“And how do we get you an anchor?”

“Sigils,” Cas says, right over the end of Dean’s question. “I need to set sigils on my body. On my human body.”

Dean isn’t sure that Cas, in his current state, is able to remember that Dean and Sam would have no way of getting any markings onto Cas’ angelic body. Cas keeps shifting between Enochian and English, and so far Dean’s kept up, but it’s obvious Cas isn’t his usual self.

“Okay,” Dean says. “Then that’s what we’ll do. You just tell me what you need.”

***************************

Sam nods when Dean tells him. He looks up from his seat in the library, his hands resting on the open pages of the current book, and nods.

“So, he has some way to keep hold of himself?” Sam asks. “At least he’s confirmed he’s used a cure already.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “But it doesn’t sound like much of a cure, does it? He isn’t even sure it’ll work, and he thinks it might...it might strip him away. Sam, he said he might forget us, forget everything. Hell, you’ve seen what he’s like. He’s already been forgetting.”

“Right,” Sam says. “But if the spell pulls away parts of him, then isn’t it a good sign that he’s had trouble remembering some things? Might just mean it’s working.”

Dean feels his face crease in confusion. He has to take a moment, to stop himself from lashing out at Sam for being so...so damn pragmatic about it. Seeing Cas before, back when his memories were missing, ranks somewhere in the worst moments of Dean’s life, and it’s not exactly an easy list to make it onto.

Sometimes, Dean forgets that Sam never saw that version of Cas. He doesn’t know what it’s like, to stare right at someone you lo- someone you care for, and find nothing but absence staring back.

It’s not Sam’s fault. He had his own demons to wrestle with back then and Dean was glad, at the time, that his brother hadn’t met Emmanuel. Now, the thought just makes Dean feel even more alone.

“What if it’s just messing with his head and not fixing him up?” he asks, after a pause. “Sam, he’s freezing. Right through to his core. You said cold means he’s dying, and he says he’s dying. I don’t… I can’t…”

He breaks off, not sure where he’s going with that sentence.

When he looks up, Sam’s staring at him with eyes that are a bit too bright to be entirely dry.

“We can’t find a cure, and Cas says he’s already used one. The only thing we can do is help him with these sigils. Did he give you a list?”

Dean nods and pushes it over to Sam, who picks it up and nods yet again.

“Right. Well, I’ll go and get this stuff for him. Okay? You...you grab a coffee or something. Take a nap. Let me deal with this for a bit.”

Dean knows Sam’s not rested any more than he has, but he also feels the fuzzy edges of exhaustion clouding his mind, and he knows he can’t go on like this for good. He’s not got the Mark to keep him from needing sleep. Not anymore.

Rubbing his hands over his face, Dean lets himself give in. Just for now. Just for a little while. Sam can get together what Cas needs and Dean can take the chance for just a few minutes’ rest while Sam does it.

He goes to his room and strips down for bed, but he’s gaze falls on that chest in the corner. In his boxers and T-shirt, Dean lowers himself cross-legged to the ground and touches a hand to the lid. He wasn’t looking for anything to keep memories in place, not when he read these.

Two hours later, he’s still scanning through the books again, barely aware that he’s shivering.

**********************************

Dean hears Sam shout for him. There’s a note threading through his brother’s voice, something that has Dean throwing himself up off the floor and breaking into a run, hitting the wall of the corridor and shoving himself away. On. To Cas’ room.

“What?” he asks, bracing himself on the doorway and trying to make the scene settle.

Sam’s standing next to the bed, half turned to the door, and he has a hand in his hair, like he needs to hold on to something. His expression is… not good. Dean’s seen that level of worry before, but it’s usually blurred, because it’s usually when Dean’s half a bottle down and refusing to give up for the night.

Cas sits on the bed, his back to Sam and his legs crossed. He holds something in his hand, something… A needle. Thread.

“You sewing something, Cas?”

Dean looks for the fabric, for some piece of clothing Cas could be mending, but there’s nothing.

“You think maybe you should be doing something else? Like healing?”

Cas speaks in that slow, careful way that tells Dean he’s struggling to stick to English. Dean should just tell him to go at it in Enochian, but Cas isn’t remembering them all the time as it is, and Dean doesn’t want to get into it, now.

“I need the sigils in place.”

“Not like this!” Sam says, and he throws a hand out, pointing at something on Cas’ thigh.

Dean’s got more used to Cas wearing nothing but boxers, but the sight still makes him shift when he thinks about it. He shoves aside the fact he’s not wearing much more himself right now.

“You want sigils on your leg, Cas?” Dean asks.

“He’s already got them on his leg,” Sam says, voice grim. “He said he needed my help to do the ones on his back. Take a look, Dean. Go on. Just see what he’s doing.”

With a sense he’s stepping on brittle bones, Dean crosses the floor, rounding the bed and kneeling to get a look at Cas’ leg. It’s covered in marks, shapes and swirls that Dean knows are Enochian, but it’s some form he isn’t used to. Being able to read it doesn’t make him half the proficient at it that Cas is.

“Why’d you want these all over-?”

“Look closer,” Sam breaks in.

Frowning, Dean leans in, and feels his stomach lurch.

“Cas,” he says, hearing his own voice drop into something closer to a croak, “that’s thread in your skin.”

“Yes,” Cas says, like that’s normal. Like the tiny knots and bumps, the pull through his skin, the welling beads of blood, is fine. “I need the sigils. But I can’t reach my back.”

Dean looks up. From this angle, Cas looms, his hair fading into the dim light around him. He’s swaying, his eyes unfocused, and Dean wonders how the stitches are so neat.

“No way,” Dean says. “You are not sticking that needle through anymore of your skin.”

He ignores the noise Cas makes, a low sound of frustration that doesn’t make it anywhere close to a word, and drops his gaze to the shapes already threaded through Cas’ skin. There are five of them, two on the meat of his thigh, one of his calf, one sprawled across his shin. Dean hovers his index finger over the last one, a sweeping shape that reminds him of a swelling wave, embroidered over the arch of Cas’ right foot.

Cas mustn’t have got to his other leg, yet.

Dean catches his lip between his teeth as he touches the pad of his finger to the largest knot. The skin around it is pulled taut.

“There is no way you are doing this to any more of yourself. You hear me?”

Cas moves, pulling his foot back, and Dean looks up to see his friend shivering in the chill air of the room. He’s still swaying, and now he’s shivering, too.

“Sigils. I need the sigils,” Cas says. He probably doesn’t even notice he’s saying it in Enochian. “Need an anchor. Might work.”

“Sam,” Dean says, his words level and his gaze on Cas, “go get me a Sharpie.”

As Cas opens his mouth, Dean surges up, getting a knee on the bed right near Cas’ crossed legs and taking hold of Cas’ face in his hands. His palms chill at once, whatever’s going on with Cas sucking the heat from Dean. He ignores it.

“You are not putting a needle through your skin. Not when you don’t need to. You hear me? Cas? You hear me?”

It’s not rhetorical. Cas’ eyes are feverish, shifting as though he can’t focus on Dean, and his lips move like he’s talking, spilling nothing but silence.

Dean almost tells Sam again, but his brother leaves without comment, and Dean’s left alone with an angel who wants to pull cotton through his own flesh, writing words in a language only he can read.

Dean doesn’t feel quite in control of himself as he watches his own thumb sweep across Cas’ cheekbone, brushing across the skin there. Skin with no marks, with no thread. Not yet.

“We’ll get you marked up, okay?” he says, putting as much assurance into it as he can. “Pen will do just fine for now. And if you need more, we’ll get a tattoo gun.” From somewhere. Must be able to steal one from somewhere. Or make one. Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he’s made. “You don’t go sticking yourself, Cas. You’re in enough of a state as it is.”

Now he’s started stroking Cas’ face, he can’t stop. Cas does nothing to stop him.

Dean’s left hand slips down to rest along Cas’ neck, the side of his hand nestled against Cas’ shoulder, and he just keeps smoothing his right thumb along Cas’ cheek, again and again until he hears Sam’s footsteps.

Cas slumps sideways when Dean pulls his hands away, and he takes hold of Cas’ shoulders, steadying him.

“You want me to do it?” Sam asks, appearing behind Cas and holding up a marker. He holds a others, red and blue and green, in his left hand. “Do you know what they should look like?”

“I’ll do it,” Dean says, needing, suddenly and viscerally, to make sure Cas has no reason to stab at himself again. Cas might not feel it. Dean’s never been sure how much of Cas’ stoicism is a genuine lack of feeling the pain and how much is an extension of his seeming belief that his own pain just doesn’t matter. “You weren’t meant to let him start anything without me.”

He rises, taking the marker from Sam and doing a complicated hand-off where his brother takes his place in front of Cas, holding onto him and keeping him steady. Sam hesitates for a moment, but he holds Cas still. He doesn’t say anything about why he didn’t wait for Dean.

“What am I drawing, Cas?” Dean asks, the marker held ready.

Cas’ back is an expanse of tanned skin, which makes no sense at all given how he always wears that full get-up. Cas mutters something and Sam nods to Dean’s left.

“The book,” he says.

Dean sees it. A notebook, cheaper and more basic than Cas’ journal, opened at a page of sprawling shapes. Sigils. Cas has drawn them out, then. Dean has to pick the book up to see them, and the number makes him wince. If Cas meant to put every one of these onto his body…

“Right,” he says. “We’d better get started.”

“They won’t be strong enough,” Cas says. “Not without being in my skin.”

“Well, they’ll have to be, because you aren’t doing that,” Dean says.

“Why won’t they be strong enough?” Sam asks, sounding much calmer than Dean feels.

“I need an anchor,” Cas says. “It needs to be strong. My own body’s only strong enough if I sink the sigils into it.”

“Then find another anchor,” Dean tells him.

There’s silence for a moment, Cas tense under his hand, until the angel swallows and answers.

“I’d need one of you to do it. And it might harm you. I won’t risk it.”

“What if we shared it?” Sam asks, and rushes on, maybe so Dean can’t interrupt. “Cas, could Dean and me both be your anchors? Wouldn’t that make it safer?”

Cas doesn’t move.

“If it makes it safer, we can do that,” Dean says.

Cas nods, but he seems reluctant.

“Yes,” he says. “In theory. If we adapt the sigils to accept three bodies. But it will mean both of you being part of this spell, and I already feel parts of me flaking away. I don’t know how much we’ll be able to save. If anything.”

“And making a tapestry on your skin? That’ll save more?” Dean asks, and Cas shakes his head. “Then we’re doing it. Same sigils? Or different? And where do they go?”

Eventually, Cas talks Dean through which sigils will need to be on each of them, red for Sam and green for Dean. After some thought, Cas directs Dean to add blue sigils, too, in among the black they each wear, and by the time they’re done they’re all painted in every colour. Cas won’t let him take out the ones in thread, perhaps thinking that will ease the burden further on Sam and Dean, and Dean scowls but doesn’t push it.

When he draws the first sigil on Cas, on the back of his neck, it shimmers and shifts, sinking smoke-like into the angel’s body until it writhes just below the surface.

“Okay,” Dean says. “That is not what happened with us.”

“I’m not just an anchor. I’m being anchored,” Cas says. “It’s different.”

Dean shares a look with Sam over Cas’ head. His brother looks as concerned as Dean feels.

“Right,” Dean says, because some sort of response seems in order. “What exactly is this spell, Cas? You say Naomi used it to keep angels, what, stitched together?”

Cas shrugs one shoulder, but doesn’t make any effort to lift his head.

“In a manner of speaking. It allowed her to build on what was left, but it was also a…I suppose a report.”

“To Naomi?” Sam asks.

“No,” Cas says. “No, to the angel being…educated. It leaves a report, a witness statement, of what you’ve seen. Of what you’ve done. It tells you who you are.”

“So it keeps hold of the important stuff?” Sam asks. “The things that make you Cas?”

“And you have to read it when you wake up?” Dean asks. “Sounds like a crappy recovery.”

Cas sighs.

“Not exactly. I’ll relive the incidents as the spell completes its work. In theory. I only managed to get hold of partial notes on the procedure. The rest is conjecture.”

“Wait,” Dean says, pausing and leaning sideways so he can at least catch Cas’ profile. “You’re saying this is a do-it-yourself surgery? How much of this is fucking guesswork, Cas?”

Cas’ jaw tightens and he scowls.

“It’s not guesswork,” he says. There’s some snap there, which is comforting in an odd way. “I’m an expert in sigilwork, Dean. It’s how I could adapt so many for your use. And since Naomi died I’ve been getting…glimpses. Of my times with her. It’s how I know to do this at all.”

Dean feels Cas shift as much as sees it, the muscles moving under Dean’s hands. Cas is far from happy about any of this.

“I had a fair bit of material to draw from,” Cas says, quietly.

Dean grimaces, but lets it drop. If this is the only chance Cas has, they don’t have much of a choice anyway. No way is Dean just seeing if Cas can tough it out, not with what he’s seen of how battered the guy’s mind has been over the years. So he places the next sigil, watches it become part of Cas, and keeps going.

As he works, each sigil merges with Cas until he’s covered in smoky shapes, a multitude of barely-there colors. When Dean catches one with the edge of his hand, it feels…wrong. It’s hard to say how, but it doesn’t feel warm or cold or anything, just wrong.

“You sure about these?” he asks.

“No,” Cas tells him. The guy’s been zoning in and out, muttering in English and then Enochian, and they’ve had to hold him steady more than once when he’s started, demanding to know who they are. “You should be safe.”

“That isn’t-“ Dean starts, and cuts himself off.

There’s no point explaining it to Cas. For all he’s been down here on Earth for so many years now, Cas seems to have trouble getting what Dean’s saying at times, like he’s not learned the nuances of some words. At least, like he’s not learned that words such as ‘worthy’ and ‘loved’ can apply to him.

Dean doesn’t like it, but he keeps going. He only has a few left, curving over Cas’ shoulders and meeting between his shoulder-blades in a knot of ink.

“What now?” he asks, capping the pen and letting it drop to the bed.

Cas jolts under the hand Dean has resting on his left shoulder and Dean hisses at a rush of heat.

Sam snatches his hands away from Cas at the same moment, and Dean just has time to share a look with Sam before everything around him whirls into a blur of colors and he loses all sense of what’s around him. Hell, he loses all sense of himself.

*****************************

It’s a garden. He’s in a garden. A moment ago he was kneeling on the bed in front of Cas, seeing the fear and worry in Dean’s eyes, and now he’s in an ordinary suburban garden. Dean’s a few feet away, the worry largely replaced with blank shock on his face.

Sam turns to look, seeing the tree on the lawn, the grass still mostly green, the leaves scattered all over.

“Where’s this?” he asks.

It seems familiar, in the way an image in a picture is, but he can’t place it. Maybe it’s just it has the look of so many gardens on so many streets. It’s the sort of place Sam gets to see, but he doesn’t get to stay.

Dean hasn’t answered, and Sam turns to him to see his brother staring wide-eyed at the house.

“Dean?”

Dean shakes his head and steps forward, his lips parting. He doesn’t get any words out.

The lines of Dean’s body say he wants to move, but he doesn’t get further than shifting his weight before the door at the back of the house opens and…Dean steps out.

Sam frowns, a sense of dislocation making him dizzy. But no. This is Dean. And that’s…also Dean. He looks younger, though. Somehow less sure. Out of place.

“This is…?” Sam asks.

Dean, his Dean, nods.

“Yeah.” His voice is gruff. He clears his throat, shoves his hand into his pockets. “Yeah. This is when I was trying out being apple pie.”

Sam nods, but his mind’s buzzing. He hasn’t worked out a pattern to what they’re seeing yet, but from the way Dean’s hunched and tense he doesn’t like being in this memory. Sam can’t blame him. He wouldn’t like being in a memory with Jess, knowing he’s already lost her. There’s only so much value in revisiting the past.

He opens his mouth to ask if Dean knows why they’ve been dragged back to this, when a noise to the side brings his head around and he starts back. Cas. Cas is right there, standing with his hands in the pockets of his trench coat, staring at Dean.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t seem to care about the breeze lifting his hair or the faint specks of blood spotting his collar. He just stares at Dean, at the younger Dean raking leaves, in silence.

For a moment, Sam thinks it’s their Cas, but the trench coat never made it through Cas being human, and the hair isn’t right. Neither’s the stance. Sam hasn’t seen Cas stand quite like that, as though he still anticipates being able to cross a battlefield with next to no resistance, in years. The thought hurts more than he would have expected it to. Which means this isn’t their Cas.

“Wait. I thought you hadn’t heard from Cas all that year?” Sam asks, turning to Dean.

The frown marring his brother’s face is answer enough, but Dean speaks anyway.

“I didn’t. The fucker left me wallowing alone.”

Which…okay. Dean’s said nothing about missing Cas that year, let alone being left.

“He’s here, Dean,” Sam says, as though Dean’s missed it.

“I see that.”

Dean’s tone doesn’t invite further conversation.

Sam wants to ask more, but he’s thrown by a feeling of such loss, of longing and regret, that it almost floors him. He’s no stranger to the feelings, but his lingering sense of regret over missing out on his suburban house and three kids with Jess has faded to something less consuming than this. He will always love Jess, but it’s no longer red-hot passion and searing grief. Now, it’s rose-petal pink, dusky and done, and his grief can be packed away into a box until he wants to look at it.

This feeling isn’t coming from Sam.

“You getting that?” he asks Dean.

“The Twilight level yearning crap?” Dean asks. “Yeah.”

He says it through gritted teeth.

“Is it…?” Sam takes a second to let his brain settle into a new orbit. “Is it you feeling that?”

“It’s not coming from me,” Dean says.

There’s an inflection there Sam can’t quite parse. He can’t decide if Dean means both of him, or just the older version.

Dean meets Sam’s eyes and they both, slowly, turn to look at Cas. At Cas who hasn’t moved from that spot.

“You don’t think…?” Sam asks.

“Not a lot of other options,” Dean says.

It’s weird anyway, looking at Cas from before he fell. Well, before he fell again. It’s never been entirely clear when Cas first fell, or what it means, or why he keeps doing it. But this is Cas before he lost Sam and Dean’s trust, before he lost his sanity, and before he lost his Grace.

Getting those things back again isn’t the same as never having lost them.

Sam forgot how stoic Cas used to be, how minute the changes in his expression, and how difficult it was to read them, a trick Dean always used to be better at. But Sam’s spent more time with Cas in the years since, and it’s easier, in some ways, to see the emotion there now, even if it’s written small.

Cas is miserable.

Cas is miserable, and shifting his weight, ready to move, and Crowley is there.

“Did you host a weekly coffee morning?” Sam asks, because his brain hasn’t quite caught up yet and the idea of Dean living in suburbia is one he’s more or less been able to skate over in his mind until now.

Dean throws him a look of disgust, and heads towards Cas. Sam follows.

A spike of anger, of loathing and denial, flares through Sam. Whatever Crowley’s saying to Cas, it’s not-

“Fuck.”

Dean stops, his head snapping around at Sam’s voice.

“Dean, this must be-”

“When he made that deal, yeah,” Dean says.

The set of his mouth is grim, and it hits Sam how close Cas was to Dean, how close he must have been to just going to Dean and telling him about Raphael, and Sam isn’t sure what to think about that, what to feel.

A spike of anger is followed swiftly by doubt and resignation, and Cas is turning and walking away, and Dean… Dean in the memory just keeps raking leaves. Sam’s Dean takes a step after Cas, clenches his fists, and turns back to Sam.

“You got any idea why this is something we have to see? Can’t see why Cas would want to keep this,” Dean says.

Sam shrugs.

“We don’t really know how this spell works. It’s a...a witness statement, right? A report? I guess this is a key part of Cas’ actions over the last few years. Must count as important.”

“Well, I didn’t need to see it,” Dean says, but he sounds shaken under the anger.

Not only that. Sam can feel something beneath Cas’ emotions now, something that feels different from the angel. Anger and hurt and dismay. Fuck. He’s linked to Cas and to Dean.

“Maybe you did,” Sam says, and pushes on before Dean can protest, because now he’s focusing on it he can feel how this is something Dean’s struggling with. “Think about it, Dean. You wanted to know why Cas didn’t come to you, but he did.”

“He didn’t tell me what was going on, Sam. He walked off with Crowley!”

Dean spits that out with all the anger and hurt of years ago, but it jars.

“You mean like when you got into a deal with Crowley?”

“That’s not the same.”

“Which time?” Sam sees his brother’s head snap back and keeps going. “We’ve both dealt with Crowley. Hell, we dealt with him to stop Cas right after the whole swallowing souls thing went down. And that’s before we get to the Mark, to getting Crowley to help with Amara. I mean, come on, Dean. What did Cas do that was really so bad?”

“He walked away!”

The ground under Sam’s feet lurches, and he staggers. It knocks Dean, too, but not enough to shake him from his stance, or to wash the anger from his face. Sam thought Dean was over this, that he’d made his peace with what Cas did back then, but knowing how close Cas came to bringing the problem to Dean seems to have shaken it all back up. It tastes of sulfur and iron, a hot tang in the back of Sam’s throat, and he wonders if Dean lives his emotions like this all the time, or if this is a legacy of the Mark.

Sam makes it to Dean as the colors slip and merge, and grabs his brother’s arm as everything around them whirls together.

“Thought we’d get a bit longer in one memory,” Sam says. Shouts, really, as the buzzing starts up.

The noise rises as green and blue and brown and grey are joined by colors seen nowhere in Lisa’s yard: silver and electric blue and crimson and burning yellow. Sam has no idea what they are, what they mean, but he does know they dance by him, sweep him up, and demolish the memory he was in.

No. Not demolish. They’re doing this to preserve these parts and pieces of Cas, not to let them be destroyed.

It does feel like something’s being lost, though, and he doesn’t know what.

************************

The next memory is heat and pressure and some thread of decay neither Winchester wants to examine too closely. Sam doesn’t see Dean, but he does feel him, or thinks he does. It’s layered under such feelings of determination and disgust and cold, calculating evaluation, a sensation of gleaming crystal shards sliding into place, that Sam has to work to tell Dean’s even there. Now he knows he can sense Dean, he manages to locate him, though. The fear and panic is easy enough to recognise when he does. It’s what’s in Sam’s heart, after all.

Neither one of them is happy to be experiencing Cas’ perception of Hell.

Sam feels something knock against the ridge of his right hand. It takes him a long moment to realise it’s Dean, reaching for him, and seconds more to work out how to grab hold. Holding hands in Hell. There’s a joke in there, somewhere, he’s sure of it.

With physical contact comes solidity, the sensation of something under his feet, of air pressing in around him, humid and hot. This isn’t what he remembers from his time in the Cage. That had been cold and biting.

“We’re in the Pit,” Dean says, and the undercurrent of shock is clear.

Turning his head, realising he has a head to turn, Sam sees his brother staring in what has to be horror. Tendrils of it reach Sam, but it feels muted, like Dean’s clamping down on it. Dean looks far too close to shutting down.

“The Pit?” Sam asks.

“Dante didn’t get the zoning right, but you gotta know there’s different parts to Hell, Sam,” Dean says, but the snap he tries falls flat, his tone distant. “This is Alas-”

Dean grimaces as he cuts himself off. Sam doesn’t ask him to continue. The dread thrumming through Dean is enough that Sam doesn’t want to poke at that.

“What are we doing here?” he asks. “This can’t be where Crowley brought Cas.”

“It’s not,” Dean says, his words clipped. “It’s where I brought Cas.”

The rasping edge to Dean’s words grates in Sam’s ears, but set against the seething hatred and rage and wrongness he feels from all sides, it’s just another irritant. Besides, he’s gathered himself together enough to track Dean’s gaze, and what he sees pushes the rest aside.

His brain has trouble latching on, the shapes refusing to settle into something whole, and it’s like watching an oil spill on dark water, but Sam learned a lot being trapped with Lucifer, and he picked up just enough to focus, to angle his mind enough to…

“That’s you,” he says.

Dean doesn’t bother replying.

With his sight adjusted, Sam sees the soul on the rack before Dean, and he sees how little of it’s left in one piece. His vision wavers, his mind trying to make it something human. A jut of hipbone, the struts of a cracked rib-cage, flesh clinging… Sam does his best to stop seeing like a human. He’s had enough brushes with demons and angels that he should be able to wrap his mind around another perception, one without the beating of a heart in the open air.

“Dean, this wasn’t your fault,” he says.

“I picked up the knife.”

Sam’s hardly getting anything from Dean right now. The Dean in this memory, the one in front of the rack, is more absence, more a slithering mass of want and resentment and pain, than it is anything human. However much he tries, Sam’s mind keeps skittering away from it. A glittering thread of green-gold runs through the rest, and that snags Sam’s gaze.

Movement to the right pulls Sam’s attention away from his brother’s increasingly demonic soul, and his mind tries to crack open.

“Dean…”

Sam never thought he’d see Cas, the real Cas. Their friend seems to have tucked himself away inside that vessel so well that Sam can see why Dean has such trouble working out Cas isn’t the meat and blood of Jimmy. Even so, to see it, to be so close to it, is something Sam didn’t think he’d get. But here it is.

Here Cas is.

Where Dean’s soul is twisted and dark, cursing crimson and bruise yellow, Cas’ form is blue-white and prismatic. It burns and illuminates and rings with the sort of harmonies which could shatter the world. Spinning fire encircles the angel and arcing wings of light and intent reach in six directions. Every surface Sam can focus on, even for an instant, seems to be covered with what he can only think of as eyes. A roaring fills the space around Sam, going beyond sound and into something near solid. He feels the rippled run through the rock beneath his feet.

It’s far more terrifying than the demon.

Sam shields his eyes with his free hand, his other still gripping onto Dean, but it makes no difference. The angel that will become their friend Cas burns with righteous wrath and purpose, a brilliance so strong that Sam can’t fathom how it could ever be diminished. And it hurts.

No. No, it isn’t hurting Sam. It’s that...slippage again, that seeping in of someone else’s feelings. The wrath and the purpose and the pain are all from Cas. From Castiel.

Cas has never told them much about raising Dean from Hell. Sam’s realising Cas has never told them much about anything he’s done, and they haven’t exactly pushed. And this? Seeing Cas approach Dean, feeling that sliding, geometric sense of something clicking, of a mission goal almost achieved, makes Sam dizzy. It’s the kind of dizziness that he feels when he steps too close to the edge of a high ledge, the sucking feeling of something getting ready to drag him over and down.

“Cas,” Dean says, and the name breaks.

Whatever Cas is right now, whether he can hear them or not in real time, this past version doesn’t register them. Sam would know. Past Cas is fixed on the thing that was Dean, and Sam suddenly knows he doesn’t want to see them meet for that first time. It feels...too personal.

He wonders if he should be here at all.

Dean moves, pulling on Sam’s hand, and it ends up with the two of them pressed shoulder to shoulder. Dean’s eyes are wide and glassy.

“Sam, that’s Cas.”

He says it like Sam could have misunderstood what he was looking at.

“Yeah. Yeah, Dean, I know.”

“No,” Dean says. “No, Sam, that’s Cas before we ruined him. Before I ruined him. That’s what he’s meant to be.”

Sam wonders if Dean can’t feel the pain, because it’s there, and some of it feels fresh, brighter and sharper and incised in clear lines, but more of it is old, worn down and permanent. Scarring, he supposes, if scars can exist on a body carved of folded space and light.

Cas hasn’t told them much about his life before he met them, either, but from bits Sam’s picked up he should have expected there to be scars.

“I don’t think he was ever meant to be that,” Sam says, and sees from Dean’s expression that he doesn’t understand.

But then Dean hasn’t quite managed to accept that Sam and Dean were never meant to be hunters, for all he spits fire about Free Will and choice, about fighting fate. Some part of Dean takes it as read that their dad did the only possible thing in turning his own sons into soldiers, so no wonder Dean has trouble working out Cas didn’t have to be a weapon.

Turns out Sam doesn’t have to worry about seeing Cas pull Dean away from the rack. The colors blur and swirl, and they’re whisked away again, leaving the crystalline edges of pain and glory behind them.

*************************

Dean still has hold of Sam when they reform, pushed back into solidity by whatever it is that’s guiding them. Cas said they’d be anchoring his memories, but it only takes a moment for Dean to reject that. Surely, Cas will want them to hold onto the stuff that’s good, and no way is this good. No way this is a memory.

He’s staring down at his own dead face.

“Where are we?” Sam asks, and his voice echoes.

“No idea.”

But that isn’t quite true. There’s an edge to the place, a sense of the boundaries wavering, that reminds him of the Beautiful Room. This is something of Heaven, but not in Heaven. It still makes no sense he’d be lying dead on his back, a hole in his chest. That particular death has only happened to him once, and it was in a darkened, cluttered space, not somewhere with light spilling everywhere and an empty floor.

He thinks it says something about the two of them that there’s no horror or grief in Sam’s voice at seeing the body. There’s just confusion. There’s only confusion in what he feels from Sam, too, and Dean doubles his efforts to shut down his own feelings. No way does he want Sam to know for certain what Dean’s feeling through all of this.

Everything flickers, and the body’s joined by another, and another, and another…

“Fuck,” Sam says. “They’re all you.”

Yeah. Ten, twenty, a hundred copies of Dean’s dead body.

“Least I get to judge my best side,” he says, but he isn’t really paying attention to his own words, and the way his own mouth ticks up at the side feels like something hooking at his lips. There’s nothing amusing here. “This never happened.”

“Not that we know about,” Sam says, like he’s correcting Dean.

A woman’s voice breaks in, cold and commanding.

“Too slow, Castiel. You need to improve. You need to be fixed. Again.”

Dean spins, and is just in time to see Naomi standing just beside Cas, who’s looking down at yet another dead Dean. Cas’ blade is held loosely, and blood drips from it.

“He ever tell you about this?” Sam asks, and there’s the shock. There’s confusion, too, but from the way Sam tilts his head, from the expression on his face, Dean’s pretty sure his brother’s understood the words, even though Naomi spoke in Enochian.

“No.”

They really have to start getting Cas to talk. Whatever this is, it would have been easier if he’d known about it first. Surely.

The expression on Cas’ face hurts. It’s distant and focused and still, but there’s something in the lines of his face that tells Dean his Cas is still there, and his Cas is struggling.

“He’s got his old coat,” Sam says. “Puts it back before he lost his Grace.”

Dean blinks. Yeah. Clues. But Sam’s missed a pretty big one, and it throws Dean to realise it’s because to Sam it isn’t one. Sam never met her.

“That’s Naomi,” Dean says, and his brain’s working again. “This is her brainwashing Cas. Training him.”

The soft sound of understanding Sam makes is worse, in some ways, than the bodies on the ground. The sense of something clicking into place in Sam is just weird, for all Dean’s seen his brother work things out time and time again. Doesn’t mean he’s meant to feel it. Not any more than he’s meant to feel what Cas is…

He isn’t feeling much of anything from Cas. Naomi must have him practically shut down.

He has no idea why any part of Cas would want to remember this.

“I don’t need to see this,” Dean says, because it’s true and because he’s hoping there’s some element of this godawful spell that’ll hear and shift them out. “I don’t want to see this.”

“Maybe you do,” Sam says.

The horror is still there, wisps of it clinging like cobweb in an old house, but he sounds thoughtful, too.

Dean can’t listen to this.

“Like Hell I do,” he says, and pulls up short.

He just did see Hell. If Sam’s saying what Dean thinks he is, that the spell means seeing what they need to see, for whatever reason, then that means Dean needed to see himself all twisted and tainted, that he needed to see Cas before Cas laid a hand on him and was lost. And that can’t be right. He doesn’t need that kind of kick, and he can’t see how Cas could need it, either.

“The spell’s not for us,” he reminds Sam. “It’s what Cas is trying to keep hold of.”

“We don’t know that,” Sam says. “Cas said he made shit up, and we’ve got the sigils on us. Hell, I can feel your…your feelings. You can feel mine, can’t you?” He doesn’t wait for Dean to nod. “And I can tell that’s Enochian, Dean, but I understand it way more than I do outside of this spell. That’s coming from you, or from him. Maybe both of you. So it’s all tangled up. Maybe some of this is what we need to see.”

Dean shakes his head, refusing to believe that, and Sam doesn’t push it.

“Do you feel it?” Sam asks instead.

Dean almost asks him what, but the taste of duty and power and pain is still strong on his tongue from Hell, and that’s easier to take than what he felt back in Lisa’s garden. Cas’ feelings. Sam’s asking if he feels those.

He doesn’t.

“Maybe it shut down,” Dean says, and then makes himself share his earlier thought. “Maybe Naomi shut him down.”

Sam makes a noise that sounds anything but believing. Worry and a kind of grief leach out of him and it occurs to Dean that Sam hasn’t always been there for Cas’ worst hits. Doesn’t look like Dean has, either, but he’s been around for more of them than Sam has, he thinks.

The scene around them flickers again, and the bodies cover the floor. Dean sees his own body twisted in a thousand deaths and feels nothing. Not like he’s that attached to his own life, not for its own sake. Sam’s right next to him, and this whole pile of crap is about saving Cas. A few dead Deans aren’t important.

Sam grabs his arm, pulling him back around, and this time they see Cas stalking after a Dean that’s still living, still breathing, still begging.

Begging.

Seeing himself dead hardly means anything, but hearing himself beg is too close to a memory he shares with Cas. And this Cas isn’t listening.

Sam flinches when Cas breaks this Dean’s wrist, turns his head away when Cas’ blade sinks into Dean’s chest.

Naomi appears, approval seeping from her, and Cas doesn’t so much as twitch as she praises him, as she calls him fixed.

It’s a relief when the spell takes them away.

**********************

Cold. That’s the first thing Dean feels, even before the world steadies around him and he sees where they are now. It’s just so...so cold.

His vision clears and he sees Sam hunching into his shirt, hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets and his body curved as though he’s trying to create a cave of warmth with his torso. It’s the way he stands when they’re on stakeout and can’t afford to move out of the cold, or the way he used to, back when they couldn’t afford decent coats.

“It look like it should feel this cold to you?” Sam asks.

Dean looks around and sees grey skies and the sort of clouds that are going to hang around for days, but there’s nothing more than a slight nip in the air. It’s not sunbathing weather, but it isn’t cold enough for the deep chill that’s sunk right into his flesh.

“Not really.”

Worry bites at him, because if this isn’t cold they’re feeling because of being in the memory’s location, that means it’s the freaky link they have to Cas. That means Cas, in this memory, is freezing his ass off.

Dean scans the area, checking for any warehouse that might house an industrial freezer, or anything Cas might be trapped in. Not that he’s ever heard Cas talk about getting stuck in one, but Cas seems to have missed a fair few things out. Like killing thousands of fake Deans.

“There he is,” Sam says.

Dean wheels around, latching onto Cas after a dizzying second where he’s sure Sam has it all wrong. The guy across the street is hunched worse than Sam, looking less like he’s trying to stay warm and more like he’s trying to fold out of existence. The puffy coat he’s wearing looks warm at first glance, but Dean only has to look at it properly to see it’s worn and not quite the right size. Cas looks almost exactly the way he did when Dean told him he had to leave the Bunker, the same scruff covering his chin and the same haunted, jolted look on his face.

He wonders how long this is after he threw Cas out into the cold.

“He’s human,” Sam says, and he says it with a hint of wonder.

Sam saw Cas as a human, he did, but he didn’t see the look on the guy’s face when he was told his safe haven was chucking him out, or see the way Cas was trying to fit himself into a human job and a human life that, at the time, Dean had felt equal parts amused and disgusted by. It was beneath Cas, is what it was.

When Cas had told him he’d lost everything, Dean hadn’t known what he meant.

Now, the sensations sliding in with that cold coil themselves around Dean’s lungs, making it really fucking hard to breathe.

Cas is adrift. He’s frightened and cold and lost and confused and overwhelmed and more alone than Dean’s ever felt, the kind of alone that he maybe should have felt in Purgatory but didn’t. The sort of alone where everything you ever knew is gone and there’s no getting it back.

“Shit,” Dean says. “What the fuck did I do to him?”

But he knows what he did. Really, he’s known for years. He treated Cas like he was indestructible when he'd just seen the guy being destroyed. And now he’s feeling it.

“That’s…” Sam says, and there are tears in his eyes. “God, Dean, how’s he standing with all that in him?”

Pain is something they’ve both felt before, physical and emotional, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. But this is pain felt by someone who’s built up no tolerance, by someone who’s got no callouses to act as some sort of buffer, ugly and thick though such things can be.

“I don’t know,” Dean says. “I guess he doesn’t know how not to.”

Because Cas has never really stood still. Not really. When Dean thought Cas was taking his time to adjust, and maybe to start building a human life, it was only a few months after this, and Dean remembers how being at Lisa’s was standing still only in the same way treading water in a rushing torrent is standing still. It took fighting just to stay where he was.

Fuck, but he’s selfish. Ignorant. He never stopped to think it could be that way for Cas with this.

He watches as Cas stops and stares into the window of a bakers, the bread stacked in the display bringing a wave of hunger. Dean knows. He feels it.

“Fuck, does the guy not have any happy memories?” Dean asks.

He’s starting to wonder if they should be helping Cas keep his memories. Maybe he’d be happier without them.

************************************

This can’t be where Cas stayed.

Dean avoids looking at Sam as they follow Cas away from the counter at the Gas N Sip and into the back room. Cas’ arm is wrapped up, so Dean can place it pretty accurately, and Dean’s struggling to hold on to the idea that Cas has a little apartment somewhere, or even a room in a motel. Doesn’t matter how crappy it is. Somewhere other than the storeroom at his place of work, please God.

Ignoring Sam gets harder when Dean spots the sleeping bag, frayed and patched, tucked behind a box at the back.

“Dean-” Sam starts.

“Don’t.”

“But…” This time, Sam trails off, but his question hangs in the air anyhow, not needing words to make it heard.

“Don’t!”

Dean says it low and fierce, but he’s pretty sure the person he’s really mad at is himself. He didn’t chase it up, when Cas came over evasive and refused to let Dean go back to his apartment. Dean had assumed Cas was just pissed at being told to leave the Bunker, or had bad neighbours, or something. Anything. Anything that meant he had a home.

Maybe that’s not true. Maybe Dean just wanted to believe any of those things, and let himself be persuaded to overlook the hints. He didn’t see it because he didn’t want to see it.

The cold from before is still there, even if it’s not quite as bad as it was outside, but it’s the kind of cold that’s settled bone-deep and feels set to grow there, vine-like, up through the marrow.

“He shouldn’t have been out here alone,” Sam says, fast enough that he’s half way through the sentence before Dean can stop him. “Dean, he should have been with us.”

Dean runs a hand down his own face, feeling the tug of flesh under fingertips. Sometimes, he wishes he could pull his whole face off, like a mask, and just throw away this man who gets his friends killed, who sends them out into the cold.

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Then why-?”

“It was your life, Sam!”

Dean can’t quite believe they’re having this conversation again.

“And that meant he had to be out here all on his own? What, you couldn’t put him up in a motel somewhere at least?”

At least Sam’s not calling Dean on forcing Sam to live when he didn’t want to. They’ve had that out, more than once, and he thinks Sam gets it now. He thinks he gets why it was wrong. Either way, Sam’s right. Dean had the option of driving Cas somewhere, of using that knowledge of credit card fraud to get Cas someplace to sleep that had a bed and heating, and instead he… Well. He had a bag in the car, ready to hand Cas at the bus-stop he drove him to, and it wasn’t until he got back to the Bunker he realised he hadn’t handed it over, too busy trying not to break and let Cas see how painful this was.

He should have tracked Cas down right away, made him take it. At the time, he was still shaken at having to turn Cas out at all, when he’d just got his friend safe and warm and present, and Gadreel had met him at the door. Had told him if he went after Cas that would be against their deal. Dean had weighed things up and found Sam tipped the scale further than Cas did. He thinks now he was using the wrong scale entirely.

“Yeah,” he says now. “I know. I screwed up.”

Sam turns away, running his hands through his hair. He looks like he wants a distraction, but if there’s one thing about a stockroom at a Gas-N-Sip, it’s that it’s pretty distraction free. Cas must go out of his mind with boredom in here.

He watches as the Cas in this memory rolls out the sleeping bag and settles onto it, his movements slightly awkward. Dean can’t tell if it’s being human, or just Cas being Cas, or the injured arm hampering his movements.

The guy sits for a while staring at nothing, and sighs.

With a grimace of pain, he reaches under a box and pulls out a journal and a pen, and Dean thinks for a moment it’s the one Cas brought with him to the Bunker. But the cover’s a different color.

“How’d he hurt his arm?” Sam asks. “Do you know?”

“Rit Zien tried to kill him,” Dean says. “It was when I was here.”

And he drove off and left Cas. God, he didn’t even check Cas had money for more pain meds, just tossed him a bottle he had in the trunk and left it at that.

“Shit,” Sam says. “It went after Cas?”

Dean takes a moment to regret he’s never told Sam more than the barest of bones about his visit to Cas. Keeping Ezekiel in Sam and then getting Gadreel out became more important. Anything that distracted from that had to be pushed aside. Cas had to be pushed aside.

“Triage angel,” Dean says, because he told Sam the Rit Zien was an assassin, or something to that effect, rather than admit to the state Cas was in at the time. And it was only later he admitted to Cas being there at the time. Far as Sam was concerned, the Rit Zien was targeting humans. “Heals on the battle-field. Or puts the ones who can’t be saved out of their misery.”

“The ones who can’t be saved?” Sam asks, a note of horror clear in his words. “Misery? And it went after Cas?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and rubs at the back of his neck. “Look, he, er, he wasn’t doing so good. I thought he was. You know? In a way. Got himself a job, seemed to be making friends. I thought he had a chance at a life. “

“A human life working in a Gas N Sip?” Sam asks, like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. A pulse of that feeling hits Dean from his brother at the same time the words do. “Cas? A Seraph? You think that’d be normal to him?”

“So I wasn’t thinking it through!”

Movement catches his eyes and they both turn to watch as Cas settles on his side. There is no stretch of the imagination by which that expression can be called content.

“I screwed up. All right?” Dean asks. “I was just so scared Zeke would up and leave without you being healed, and he said Cas had to go, and I talked myself into seeing this as a good thing.”

Sam closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, they’re sea-grey and sad.

“I never wanted this for Cas,” he says. “The guy saved us, both of us, and this is his thanks? No. Dean. I get it. I do. And I know we’ve been over this, and I… Well, I can’t exactly say I’m innocent, here. What I did about the Mark…”

“Hey,” Dean says, holding up a hand. “We’ve both screwed up. Okay? And we’ve both screwed Cas over.”

He bites down on the thought that Cas has screwed them over, too. He isn’t anywhere near ready to unpick all of who’s done what to whomever and why. He doesn’t want to think there’s a balance sheet for that shit, but he knows if he opens it up he’ll find himself acting like there is one.

Cas on his sleeping bag shifts, grimacing, and a wave of pain floods through Dean.

Sam must feel it, too, because he turns to face the ex-angel, his face pinched with worry or sympathy or something.

“Everything’s stronger to him,” Sam says, almost wonderingly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I get that,” Dean says.

He thinks maybe, for the first time, he does.

************************************

Joy is strong, too. And deep and echoing and warm.

Dean watches as Cas touches his fingers to the towel, and the marvel of its softness is something that shouldn’t grate on Dean’s heart.

“This is when we brought him back,” Sam says from his place by the bedroom door. “This is after he was killed by that Reaper and we brought him to the Bunker.”

Neither of them say outright it’s from when Dean cast Cas out, but it is. Or will be. Or was.

In about two hours, Cas will be staring at Dean like he’s been abandoned, and what’s worse is that’ll be nothing but the truth. Right for now, Cas closes his eyes and breathes, and Dean wants to wrap the guy in his arms and just...just hold him.

Safety and reassurance and relief swim through Cas. Worse. Gratitude. Cas was fucking thankful they brought him here, that they pulled him out of what must have seemed like his own version of Hell. And Dean has to witness this knowing he’s about to rip it all away, to cast Cas back down.

It’s a brief memory, thank whatever might be out there.

Within moments, Cas in his torn clothes and gratitude is swept away. Dean hopes they’re done seeing Cas when he was human.

*************************

“You’re the boy with the demon blood,” Castiel says.

And it is Castiel. Sam can see it. There’s an edge to Cas back here that’s missing in the Cas they’ve come to know and love. It’s a bell-deep echo of something he can’t quite grasp, and Cas, slighter in human form than he is in the modern day, towers. He looms.

“I forget what he was like,” Dean says from beside Sam.

“Yeah. And what’s that I’m feeling?” Sam asks, because he daren’t trust what he thinks he feels. He can’t.

Dean shifts, his feet making noise on the shoddy motel carpet.

“Warmth,” he says. “Some kind of affection? Sam, you get any of that when you actually lived this?”

“Hell, no,” Sam says. “All I got was… Well, I was awed. That’s the only word. Awed to meet an angel, and then he said that, and held my hand, and I felt like, like I shouldn’t be marring something so holy with my presence. You know? Like I was profane.”

He glances at Dean and sees his brother nod, but Dean doesn’t feel certain, from the tiny bit Sam can sense of him.

“I could never work that out,” Dean says. “How you could be so...into the holy crap. Cas was a scary mother when he first showed up, and, yeah, there was always something about him, but holy? Don’t forget, we thought he was some high level demon at first.”

“Seen a few of those now,” Sam says, and isn’t sure what point he’s making.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “But I never thought Cas was as pure and holy as you did. And I hated how he spoke to you here.”

They fall silent. Sam doesn’t know what Dean’s thinking, but he knows he’s marvelling at that warmth from Cas. Cas said boy with the demon-blood and Sam heard it as condemnation. Now, he feels it as sympathy.

Cas never judged him. Cas felt for him. The very first time they met, and Cas felt for him.

Sam thinks he sees why this is a memory Cas wants to keep.

********************************

“You think he’s choosing what we see?” Dean asks. “Or you still think we are?”

They’re standing in sepia, a washed-out nightmare of browns and near-black blood that shouldn’t be the place to have an introspective talk about anything, but Dean lived here for a year. Hell, in some ways this still feels like home.

He can almost understand why Benny chose to come back.

Go back. Go. Dean needs to remember that he isn’t really here.

Sam shrugs. He’s no stranger to weird settings, either, even if his own trip through this place was brief by comparison, not loaded with the need to find Cas. And it’s not like either of them is in physical danger. As far as they can tell, they’re really just observers. No, there’s no chance of threat.

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Sam is somehow still shrugging, and he finishes up by shoving his hair back behind his ear, even though it looks like it was just styled. “I mean, Cas cast the spell, right? Makes sense it’d latch onto what he wants to keep.”

“And you think he’d want to keep all that crap about being human? Really, Sam? You think Cas wants to remember being cold and lonely and hurting? What sense does that make? If I could chop a bunch of crap out of my skull, you think I’d keep all the times I felt like that?”

Which he knows is a mistake, the moment he says it. Which is to say half a second before realization blooms in Sam’s eyes and his brother’s head rocks back, just enough to make Dean feel like he’s punched him.

“All the times?” Sam asks. “Dean, I-”

“Don’t. All right? We’ve been over this.”

They haven’t. Not really. Sure, they’ve danced around the edges of it, but they’ve never, not really, pawed through all those years where Dean went hungry so Sam could eat, and they sure as Hell aren’t starting now.

Sam must hear what Dean’s saying there, because he nods, his jaw tense. But he drops it.

“Right. Fine. But, I don’t know, maybe Cas needs some of those memories. I mean, think about it. It can’t be easy for an angel to change. How long has Cas been alive, anyway? And how much has he changed since we’ve known him? Maybe if he ditches those memories, he won’t...he won’t be him.”

“Now him?” Dean asks.

Because, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Maybe Dean wouldn’t be himself without the evenings sitting with a belly cramping from hunger after his kid brother ate the last of the mac ‘n’ cheese. Maybe, if he hadn’t spent so much of his childhood and teens focused on keeping Sammy safe, he’d be able to do a better job now of letting Sam just live. Or die. Whichever.

He doesn’t know what it says about him that he can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.

“What if Cas shouldn’t be like now him,” Dean says. “No. Think about it. All we’ve seen so far is pain. What if he’d be better off forgetting all of this? Going back to whatever he was before us.”

Now, Sam frowns, that still, careful look on his face that means he’s digging deep into that big brain of his.

“We don’t get to decide what Cas is and isn’t, Dean,” he says. “We’ve both said we need to stop blocking the other’s play. We need to let each other just...just be.”

“Yeah. So?”

Dean can’t help but think how well they’ve actually done at that, which is not very.

“So we have to let Cas make his choices, too. He wants to keep who he is now. He said as much.”

“He said he wanted to keep himself,” Dean argues. “He said he wanted to keep his family. You and I both know we’ve lost him his entire family. The heavenly one, anyway.”

“What are you saying, Dean?” Sam asks, narrowing his eyes.

Dean shakes his head and turns away, running a hand over his face. He can’t quite look at Sam as he says this. He looks out at the brown-tinted trees instead.

“Maybe he should forget us. The other angels might take him back if he was like he used to be. Hell, they might beg him to come back, if they got a version of Cas washed clean of us, of our… of our corruption.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sam says from behind him. “I don’t believe they’d take him back now, whatever. And I don’t believe Cas would want to forget us. Come on, Dean. You said it. He is family.”

Sam doesn’t sound entirely solid on that. Well, he sounds solid enough, but not quite like he gets the bone-deep meaning that word has for Dean. He says it like a label he’s applying, and not as a truth. The feelings that flicker up around the word are warm, but not what Dean feels.

“He’s family to me,” Dean says.

“What do you mean? That he isn’t to me?”

What?

Dean’s surprised enough he turns back and scowls.

“What are you talking about? Where’d you get that from?”

Sam’s face is still, with just that edge to it that says he might be really hurt. He must have managed to shut down some of the seeping emotions the way Dean’s been trying to do, because the hurt doesn’t reach Dean.

“You said he’s family to you,” Sam says, throwing a hand out at Dean, like there might be some confusion who he meant, “so are you meaning he isn’t to me? You think I don’t care about him? Dean, he’s my best friend, too.”

And that’s just it, isn’t it? Cas is Dean’s best friend. Or was. Hell, Bobby even used that descriptor for Cas. Thing is, Dean isn’t sure it’s still the case, exactly.

Since then, he’s met and been close to Benny, and he’s more or less accepted a weird friendship with Garth and there’s been that whole...thing with Crowley. And every one of those has been different, from each other and from what he’s got with Cas.

He doesn’t want to look at that too closely, but he knows when he called Cas ‘brother’, the word didn’t have the same texture, the same taste, as when he uses that word with Sam, or when he applied it to Benny.

“He’s more than a friend,” he says instead, because it’s as close as he can manage.

Sam draws in breath, seeming to get taller, and nods.

“Okay. Okay, so he’s more to you. Fine. I don’t pretend to get what goes on with the two of you. But he means a lot to me, as well. Near as I have any family but you, Cas is it.”

There’s too much in that to unpack in a few sentences, and Dean is cut off from even trying. Footsteps break the near silence of Purgatory, and he pulls around to see himself push through between closely standing trees.

Benny’s right behind him, Cas at his heels. They’re looking in different directions and the set of Cas’ shoulders says he’s tense.

Past him stops and scans the area before turning to the others, impatience in his voice.

“You two gonna pick up the pace, or are we going to be in this armpit of the cosmos for another fucking year?”

Benny glances over and sort of smiles, slow and warm.

“No argument from me, brother,” he says. “It’s the swan here you need to be telling.”

“Swan?” Cas says, squinting, his attention finally on the area in front of him.

“Floating along, all regal and above it all,” Benny says. “Got a nasty temper.”

“Don’t start,” past Dean says, before Cas has his mouth even part-way open to reply. “We might as well stop here for a while, get some rest. Maybe you’re both just grouchy because you haven’t had your beauty sleep.”

Benny rolls his eyes and Cas looks confused, but they do as Dean says. Irritation bleeds through from Cas as the angel looks at Benny, but it’s not the antagonistic feeling Dean might have expected.

“They didn’t get along?” Sam asks from Dean’s shoulder.

“Not really,” Dean says. “I think Benny was pissed at Cas for running off for so long. Figured it just slowed us down getting out.”

Which it did. If Dean’s going to be honest about it, it did.

“He thought you should leave Cas behind?” Sam asks.

And that’s his giant of a little brother, seeing more than Dean thinks he’s shown.

“Yeah, kinda.”

“And he said that?” Sam asks.

“It’s not important,” Dean says, as they watch the three inhabitants of this memory settle down, Cas a little further away than seems right. “And I got it, all right? What was Cas to Benny? Just some creature I insisted on finding before I’d get us out.”

“Still, I can’t see you liking hearing that.”

Dean doesn’t see any point in answering. He shrugs.

“We all got out eventually,” he says, because it’s easier than thinking about how it went down.

Cas told Dean that staying was nothing to do with Dean, that it was about Cas and his guilt, his angelic need to repent. To atone. Cas and his endless redemption arc leading nowhere good.

It’s never felt like that to Dean.

“So, you think Cas needs this? To remember who he is?” Dean asks.

“Sure,” Sam says. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? If it really is taking us to places Cas need as an...an anchor.”

Sam grimaces, and Dean thinks he must be picturing those stitches, the sigils Cas intended to use as an anchor before they butted in and stopped him sinking thread into his own human skin.

It says something Dean doesn’t want to look at too closely that Cas saw nothing wrong in that, and Dean isn’t sure if it says something about Cas’ connection to his vessel, which he even calls his body now, or if it says something about how Cas has been taught to view his real body. He wonders how far Cas, how far all the angels, have been taught that their own selves are nothing more than a surface for Heaven’s will.

“He needs this craphole as an anchor,” Dean says.

But it makes a kind of sense. If Cas is remembering the hard times, the pain and isolation of being human and the moment he turned away from Dean to follow Crowley and who knows what other crap they haven’t been forced to live through again yet, then he needs this.

Dean felt pure here, in a way, and he might still struggle to get why Cas thought he had to stay, but he does know Cas at least hoped it would give him peace, to stay and be punished here. Maybe it is something Cas needs to hang on to, that he at least tried to pay for the things he still feels so desperately guilty for.

That’s what Dean can taste in the air: guilt.

It’s layered through other things, a lot of which he’s felt in the other memories, to one degree or another. At this point, Cas’ love is just a fact, something wound deep into him. His frustration and determination and pain are all a solid part of him, too, but the guilt feels especially strong, here.

Cas didn’t feel as guilty later. No. That’s not quite true. The guilt was still there, in those later memories Dean’s already lived in, but bedded down, like a stone sunk to the bottom of a river. Here, it’s still on the surface.

Maybe Sam’s right. Maybe Cas does need this memory, even if just to let that guilt sink.

Dean wishes he could pick it up and hurl it away, but the things Cas carries are too heavy for that. Not like anyone can really throw away guilt for your own actions, anyway. Dean knows.

But maybe he could do more to talk to Cas about it, to help him understand he doesn’t have to drown himself because of it.

Dean’s still thinking about that when the memory dissipates around him, his last impression one of his past self asleep on the ground, with Cas watching over him. The guilt in that instant is tempered by something softer and deeper, but Dean hesitates to name it. He doesn’t feel he has the right to claim that feeling from Cas, not with the things he’s seeing in this spell.

***************************

A stray breeze lifts Sam’s hair from his neck, cooling his skin. He sees mountains in the far distance, but nothing between them and the road they’re standing on. Heat haze makes it hard to tell if there’s anything coming along the road.

“When’s this one from?” Dean asks.

Sam feels a thin thread of hopelessness from his brother, and with the way Dean’s got everything locked down he doesn’t want to think about what that says.

“At least there’s more colors than brown,” Sam says, because he doesn’t have an answer to Dean’s question. There aren’t many more colors, either, but the blue of the mountains and the reds and yellows in the earth are a blazing riot after Purgatory. “You feel anything yet?”

Dean’s rubbing at his chest, as though trying to shift heartburn, and he frowns over at Sam.

“It’s all muted. Weird.”

Sam nods. Yeah. Not quite like when Naomi had her hooks in Cas, and he was shut down, but the feelings are far less vivid now. There’s still the usual mix, but Sam feels a new sadness, a queasy mix of dizziness and nausea, and a confusing wash of affection.

It feels like an age before a car appears in the distance, rippling into view in a way that makes Sam wonder blearily if it’s teleported itself into the scene. Wouldn’t be the strangest thing to ever happen in his life.

“That’s Cas’ car,” Dean says, before Sam’s managed to place the thing.

It’s not a surprise when the car rattles to a halt at the side of the road, but it is a shock to see Cas isn’t the one driving.

“Hannah,” Dean says. “This is from when he was palling around with that Hannah.”

Sam doesn’t need to feel Dean’s emotions to place at least some of that. His brother doesn’t like Hannah. He doesn’t like Hannah being around Cas.

As they watch, both angels leave the car. Cas leans back against the door and closes his eyes as Hannah watches him over the roof. Her eyes show worry.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t seek medical help?” she asks. “Perhaps there’s something the humans can do for your vessel.”

Cas has his head tipped back. It makes him look more relaxed than his body language says he is. He doesn’t bother opening his eyes to look at Hannah, but that burst of affection grows stronger.

“The problem isn’t with my vessel,” he says.

“No,” Hannah says. “But I don’t like to see you suffer, and refuse to go back to Heaven.”

“I have work to do here,” Cas says.

“If you aren’t careful, you’ll have dying to do here,” Hannah tells him.

Sam glances at Dean to see his brother looking confused. Must be weird for Dean, to see someone he dislikes caring about Cas like this. Hell, it’s weird for Sam, too. Just seeing anyone openly show worry and concern for Cas is fucking odd. It occurs to Sam it shouldn’t be, but there it is.

“Castiel,” Hannah says, after a pause. There’s a tint of irritation there. “What good will it do Heaven for you to die?”

“All I seem to do is cause discord,” Cas says, as though it’s just a fact and not something that makes Sam’s heart ache. “Perhaps dying is the best thing I can do for Heaven.”

“No,” Hannah says, and at least she sounds definite. “No, there aren’t enough of us left to lose even one more if we don’t have to.”

Cas laughs, another of those soft, bitter things that make Sam long to hear a proper laugh from his friend.

“There aren’t any more like me anyway,” he says.

Hannah frowns, and starts as though she wants to round the car to him but daren’t.

“What?” she asks.

Finally, Cas turns to face her, and his skin is pale and sweaty. His eyes look bruised. Shit, Sam let Cas wander off into the world like that, so focused on finding Dean, and then on curing Dean, that he didn’t stop to realize how badly his other brother needed help. Sam finds himself pathetically grateful that Cas at least had Hannah.

“How many Seraphs are left, Hannah?” Cas asks softly.

Sam looks back at Hannah in time to see her eyes widen and her lips part on nothing. She doesn’t form an answer.

“I’m the last one,” Cas says. He sounds resigned. “If you can still call me a Seraph. Once I’m gone, my entire tier is gone with me. This mission, getting the last of the angels back to Heaven, doesn’t include me, Hannah. The time of the Seraphs is done with. It’s your turn, now.”

She doesn’t say anything in reply, and Cas seems to think that topic is done with, because he takes to leaning his forearms on the roof of the car, his head dipped, and just breathes.

After a while, Hannah shifts.

“Do you feel less sick? Can we continue?”

Sam and Dean don’t say anything as Cas nods, and gets in the car, and they drive off. Last of the Seraphs. Cas’ whole kind of angel gone, except him. Sam can’t think of anything to say to that. He doesn’t even know where to begin.

********************  
“Why did he leave?” Dean asks.

They’re sitting in a diner, somewhere with plenty of rain, waiting to see what state Cas will be in when he appears this time. Dean plays with a straw, bending it, stabbing it down into the table, and only looks up at Sam in brief flicks of his eyes.

Sam shrugs. He can’t blame Dean for asking.

“His borrowed Grace was slowing him down. He didn’t move quickly enough on a hunt we took and my arm got busted up.”

Dean nods, a tight movement that means nothing other than he’s heard Sam.

“And you couldn’t make him stay?”

“What?” Sam almost reaches over and snatches that straw from Dean’s hand. The ceaseless movement is starting to grate. “No. No, it was me. I told him to leave.”

The movement stops. So there’s that, at least.

“You told him to leave?” Dean asks. “When he was in that state?”

A moment later, Dean’s mouth twists and he scrubs a hand over his face, looking ill. Doesn’t take a genius to guess Dean’s remembering kicking Cas out of the Bunker himself, but Sam has to admit Dean was being made to do that. It was still a shitty thing to do, and Sam’s not okay with what he now knows Cas went through, but in Dean’s world of protecting his little brother above all else, it at least gives a reason.

“I didn’t think he was that bad,” Sam says, and it’s more or less true.

Perhaps it’s truer to say he didn’t want to see it, what with having Dean to track down. Singular focus. It used to turn up on reports from school when Sam was a kid. He never used to see it as a bad thing.

“I guess we both have some apologizing to do on that front,” Dean says, and it unknots something in Sam’s chest.

Before he can answer, the door of the diner opens and a past version of Dean walks in, Cas on his heels.

“Didn’t know you were ever that young,” Sam says, taking in this version of Dean.

His Dean turns and rakes his gaze up and down his past self. Sam watches his brother check out Cas, as well, and he’s certain he’s using the right term. This Cas is stiff shouldered and spikey haired, and Sam’s worked it out already when Dean delivers his conclusion.

“This is back when we split up, when Cas turned up and asked for help with Raphael. Couple of days before this, we thought it was Cas’ last night on Earth. Heh. I took him to a brothel.”

Sam lets that one slide. Dean is exactly the sort of person to think an angel should get laid and choose a professional to get the job done. He daren’t quite ask how that went. However it fell out, it’s a fond memory for Dean. Sam sees it in the soft creases at the edges of Dean’s eyes and the way his eyes light, as much as he feels it in a brief glimmer across whatever freaky bond they have going on.

The Dean in this memory claps Cas on the shoulder, smiling with real warmth, and points the angel to the booth they’re sitting in. They both scoot over as Cas joins them, fortunately sitting at the edge and picking up a menu.

“You hungry?” the memory Dean asks as he takes his own seat a minute later. “I can order you up some food, man. Just say the word.”

The affection from the last memory is nothing to the honey-gold wave of tenderness suffusing Cas now. The pain and guilt are far less obvious in this memory, enough so that it’s a relief, and Sam tries not to let his shock show when he feels the depth of Cas’ affection for Dean.

Not like it’s breaking news, in any case. He knows Cas loves his brother. He’s known it for so long it’s hard to say when he worked it out. Still, knowing isn’t the same as feeling.

Glancing at his Dean, he sees understanding there, Dean’s expression shocked and wondering, even though he must have felt the love before this, too. With so little else to detract from it, Cas’ love is already burning, and this is barely a year since the two of them met. Sam wonders what it must be like now, if they could sense it without the other emotions Cas seems to be always drowning in.

“Do you think he knows?” Sam asks.

“Who?” Dean asks, his voice gruff.

“Cas. Do you think Cas knows what he’s feeling? Now, I mean. Or, well, in our time, either.”

Dean already wasn’t looking at Sam, but now he’s not looking at Sam in a way that says it’s avoidance rather than just having something else to focus on.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

And Sam finds he’s had enough.

“I’m not asking you to admit you love him back,” he says, and he does feel a flash of discomfort, because he never meant to challenge Dean on this, “but you’ve gotta admit you can feel how Cas is about you. This? This is love, Dean. Come on. I’m just asking if you think he knows that’s what he’s feeling.”

Dean presses his lips together, his skin flushing.

“All right,” Sam says, sitting back. “I’m not going to say it’s none of my business, because the three of us don’t exactly have normal boundaries. Not like we grew up and live apart like normal brothers. I’m in the middle of this, too. But…all right. You don’t want to admit it, that’s up to you. I just think we should give some thought to how this all is for Cas. Because if he doesn’t know what he’s feeling-“

“He knows,” Dean says. He sounds hoarse. “He has to know. Doesn’t he?” Dean’s hand, the one resting on the table, clenches into a fist. “Sam, he gave up an army for me. Did I tell you how that went down? Guy just had to do what Hannah wanted, punish me, and he’d still have the angels at his back. And he didn’t. Said he couldn’t. So, he has to know, right?”

And he came right to Dean from Purgatory and he searched for a cure for Dean as his borrowed Grace burned him up and so many other things Sam can’t list them all.

“I think he knows you’re important to him,” he says. “I just don’t know for sure he gets what kind of love it is.”

Dean in the memory laughs at something Cas says and the angel offers a small smile. It almost hurts to see it.

“And I do,” Dean says, somehow managing to make it even more obvious he isn’t looking at Sam. “All right?”

“Do what?” Sam asks, feeling like he’s edging over an abyss.

Dean’s throat works and he pulls a face.

“I admit I feel the same way. All right? Happy now? Not like there’s a lot I can do about it.”

Sam shakes his head.

“You can feel, literally feel, that the guy you love loves you back. And he’s in the Bunker right now, Dean. Not sitting in a diner halfway across the country or fighting through Hell or lost in Purgatory. This is all in the past. Soon as we all get out of this spell, just tell him how you feel.”

“He keeps leaving,” Dean says. “If he wanted me to own up to this, he’d stick around.”

And there it is. Dean’s fear of being left behind, of not being wanted or needed.

“Maybe if he knew how you felt, that you were willing to say how you feel, he’d stay,” Sam says, not touching the multitude of things that have pulled Cas away. Too many of them might lead to hashing out who was the blame or whether Cas should have felt responsible for each mission, and Sam needs to keep this focused on Cas and Dean themselves, on what they feel for each other.. “Or at least come back more often. He’s an angel. Maybe he just isn’t built to stick in one place all the time. But he always comes back, Dean.”

Dean looks thoughtful, and Sam lets himself watch Cas as the younger Dean talks and smiles and jokes, and tries not to think how different it all could have been, if only the three of them could manage to tell each other what they thought and felt more often. If only the words would come easier.

********************

 

They swirl through more memories, landing briefly in the jewel-bright evening where Cas met Charlie, feeling the security and joy in that experience in a way that leaves them both with damp eyes.

Sam laughs as he relives an afternoon of watching TV with Cas, pointing out the details Cas is missing both from watching and from his store of Metatron’s knowledge. He remembers the time with affection, but he didn’t get how much it meant to Cas until he feels the love directed at himself in the memory. It’s different from the way Cas loves Dean, but it’s as real and as deep and as humbling.

Cas hearing of Dean’s death from Metatron is something neither one of them wants to talk about, and Sam sees tears track down Dean’s face at the despair echoing through the angel. Something else Sam didn’t get properly, that his grief over Dean was shared so fully. He knew Cas mourned, but as with so many of these memories he didn’t understand how deeply.

***

Seeing the woman Dean calls Nora is almost a relief. She’s got Cas bundled on her settee, handing him a bowl of soup, and seeing Cas with a cold is almost funny. At least, it is when they can see he’s got someone to care for him. Sam wonders if Cas will ever speak to Nora again and finds himself wanting to track her down, to thank her.

Nora asks Cas, as they watch a film with misunderstandings and romance and hope, if he’s ever felt that way for someone. Cas frowns and closes his eyes.

“I don’t…” Cas swallows and looks at Nora, who’s turned to face him, her expression open and questioning. “Yes. I don’t think I realized, not fully, until recently. But...yes.”

Sadness and honey-rose lace through Cas, and Sam hears Dean take a breath, feels Dean’s understanding.

Nora nods. She reaches out and sets a hand on Cas’ knee, a light touch. She smiles, a soft reassurance.

“The man who visited you,” she says, and it isn’t a question. “He was your ex?”

Cas shakes his head. The emotions Sam feels from him are confused, as though Cas is sure of his love and of his sadness but not of much else.

“No. He… We were friends. Family. But I must have done something. He didn’t want me around anymore.”

Now Nora looks confused. With her hand still on Cas’ knee, she leans in, as though getting closer can make this clear.

“He didn’t look like someone who wanted you gone,” she says. “Steve, I’ve seen people look that way before, and it’s never when they want to see less of a person. Look, life doesn’t always work out the way you’d want. I get that. And just because you love someone doesn’t mean you should be with them. Trust me, I get that a lot more than I wish I did. But from the bit I saw? Not wanting you isn’t the issue.”

Cas is quiet, but he feels thoughtful.

“Maybe,” Nora says, after a pause, “you should think about seeing him again. About talking with him. Perhaps distance is the problem, here. Because when he was following you around at work? I expected him to ask you to go with him.”

“If he wanted me to go with him,” Cas says, and his throat works around the words, “he only had to say.”

“Did you want him to?” Nora asks, and sympathy paints her face when Cas nods. “Okay, then. Did you tell him that?”

“I...That isn’t my…” Cas says, and can’t seem to find the end of the sentence.

There’s that sense again, of something shifting, of something realigning. Sam can’t see yet what shape the new form will take.

“It has to be someone’s place,” Nora tells him, “or you’ll just keep staring at each other the way you were, and you’ll never move any closer to what you want.”

The conversation turns to other things after that, to Nora and her hope a new guy she’s met might turn into something worthwhile, and this is one memory Sam is almost sorry to leaven.

***

The memories slip by, of Cas standing over his fallen brethren, or him hugging Dean with Chuck and Rowena in the background, of Hannah dying.  
There are others. Some are happy, but nowhere near enough.  
Hell was confusing enough, but the ones they reach after what feels like at least a day, of an Earth with rivers of fire and rains of acid, or a world covered in thick, alien jungle, or of the cold purity of Space, only sink a dizzying sense of dislocation into Sam. Castiel is ancient, and the memories from before humanity even existed are so hard to grasp they slide away even as Sam’s in them.  
He wishes he had a notebook so he could jot down the times from humanity’s history Cas’ spell takes them to. The brief glimpse they get of Babylon is enough to have Sam kicking himself for not asking Cas about his previous times on Earth.  
Sam sees his own shock reflected on Dean’s face as they watch Cas tell Crowley that if he touches the Winchesters he will tear it all down. Even in the midst of that deal, Cas still put them first.  
Sam thinks he prefers the memory of Cas standing at the edge of an ocean, a presence behind him which has to be another angel, watching some primordial creatures on the shore, but he can’t deny it’s comforting to know how precious they are to their angel.  
***********************

Dean steadies himself without thinking as the latest memory solidifies around him. They’re standing outside, at twilight, and the treeline is familiar. They’re outside the Bunker.

He connects with Cas’ emotions right away, and finds himself relaxing. Cas is more content in this memory, at least. He feels Sam’s relief, and scans the area to find where their angel has got to.

“Dean,” Sam says, before Dean can locate Cas. “It’s Mom.”

Dean sees her, standing out in the lane, and Cas is right next to her, handing her a mug of something. Mom smiles and takes it, nodding out over the view as she does so.

“It’s nice, getting out and seeing some trees,” she says. “When Dean told me what year I was in, I thought maybe it’d be nothing but skyscrapers and hover cars.”

Cas’ amusement threads through to Dean, and he finds himself smiling as well. He knew Cas and his mom had spent some time together, but seeing it is something else. They’re both more relaxed, in some ways, than when Dean’s seen them together.

“The future is rarely how we expect it to be,” Cas says.

“Speaking from experience?” Mom asks.

“You could say that,” Cas says.

They fall silent for a while, and Sam and Dean make their way over. In the twilight, Mom’s hair is more silver than gold and Cas looks peaceful. It’s not what Dean’s used to seeing.

“Do you regret it?” Mom asks at last.

Dean isn’t sure Cas will answer, because that question had the loaded weight of something deeper behind it. It’s the kind of question you can only really ask on a night like this, with stars starting to show in the sky and purple evening clouds brushing the horizon. It’s the kind of question you ask when the universe shifts and becomes more real, more expansive, and just for a few minutes you can say anything, however deep or strange or real.

“No,” Cas says. “I won’t ever regret meeting your sons.”

It must be a conversation they started earlier. From the way Mom looks up at Cas, with sympathy in her eyes, she has more idea than Dean thought she did about what kind of shit Cas has been through. Hell, the way Dean’s been shaken by all this, maybe she actually thought for five minutes together and has a better idea than Dean managed, even with living some of it.

“You’ve lost a lot,” she says. “Lost the world you had. I know what that’s like.”

Which is something else Dean needs to pay more attention to, just as soon as Mom gets back from her trip. He’s done with assuming he’s hearing everything his family’s saying, when he’s so clearly missed a lot.

“I’ve lost more than I thought possiblet,” Cas says, nodding and moving to stand right next to Mom. “But I’ve found a lot, too. I don’t regret meeting Sam, or Dean, and I don’t regret fighting for their right to choose.”

Mom smiles again, and leans against Cas arm, her head on his shoulder.

“I’m glad you’ve been with them,” she says. “I hardly know them, but I’m going to get to, and I’m really glad they’ve had you to back them up.”

Cas dips his head.

“I’ve learned a lot from them,” he says.

Yeah, Dean thinks. Cas has learned pain and abandonment and other crap no angel should know.

“I’ve learned about family,” Cas says. “I’ve watched humanity for thousands of years, but I didn’t really understand the connections of family until I spent time with your sons.”

Mom raises her mug.

“Then here’s to family,” she says, “and to you being part of ours. We’re the weirdest family in creation, but at least we have a home that’s buried underground, so it could be worse, right?”

And Dean gets to hear Cas laugh. It’s still quiet, still understated, but it’s real. He feels the warmth Cas has for him and for Sam reach out to his mom as well, and as the scenery around him shifts, he thinks maybe Cas has finally settled on a memory worth keeping.

********************

 

Dean swallows down bile as he looks around the latest memory and finds himself back in Cas’ room at the Bunker. It takes him a second longer to work out he can’t feel anything from Sam and nothing from Cas, and a heartbeat longer to get that it’s no memory.

They’re back.

“Cas!”

Dean lunges forward, his hands reaching for Cas’ shoulders before his vision even clears. He needs to make sure the guy’s still there, on that bed and in that body. He needs to make sure they still have their Cas.

That Dean still has his Cas.

Cas sits on the bed, right where Dean left him, swaying slightly, and Dean feels a shock of relief as his hands meet flesh.

The marks on Cas’ skin are still there, still lingering just under the surface, like the spell somehow found a way to infuse Cas’ subdermal layer with darkly colored smoke. Dean tries to ignore them, tries to ignore how they feel different from the patches of clear skin. For one thing, the marks aren’t the right temperature. He still can’t tell if they’re too warm or too cold, just that they aren’t right.

He lets his fingers skate over them and steadies the angel, who looks up at Dean with eyes that are far from clear.

“Cas?” Dean asks again.

“Dean,” Cas says, and it strikes a familiar chord.

So many times, Cas has greeted Dean with his own name, as though that’s all the proof that’s needed of anything Dean might be asking. This time, he isn’t going to assume it’s a code they both know when he’s just lived through evidence he isn’t always translating Cas right at all.

“I’m gonna need more than that, buddy. You feeling okay? Still cold? Know who you are?”

As he asks, one hand slips up from Cas’ shoulder to his face, fingers settling around the back of Cas’ neck and head. As usual, Cas makes no attempt to question Dean or to pull away, and after what he’s seen the last however many hours they’ve been under, after what he’s felt, Dean thinks it might just be more than Cas not being human and not getting human social rules.

He lets him hold on.

Cas swallows.

“I think I remember,” he says, “but I don’t suppose I’d know if I’d forgotten some things without checking.”

The journal. Cas didn’t write the journal for Dean. He wrote it for himself, so he could check whether he’d retained his most precious memories.

“Well, you’re speaking English,” Dean says. “That’s one thing, right?”

Dean looks over at his brother to see Sam watching Cas with warm concern. It’s been a learning experience, this whole thing. He already knew Sam and Cas cared about one another, but he somehow missed the depth of it. It’s amazing to him now how he didn’t see it on Sam’s face and hear it in his voice. Just because Sam came over more...well, more intellectual about Cas saying yes to Lucifer didn’t mean Sam saw Cas as anything but important.

And getting side-tracked by a mission isn’t an issue only Sam faces.

“Yes,” Cas says. “Thank-you, Sam. I feel… I’m not cold now. The spell worked.”

He could sound happier about it.

“And you’ve got all your...all your you?” Dean asks.

He hears Sam snort behind him and sees Cas’ eyes narrow.

“As I said-” Cas begins.

“You can’t be sure,” Dean finishes for him. “Yeah. I get that. But you still feel like you, though, right? Like Cas?”

He nearly says ‘our Cas’, but that seems too cheesy. He nearly says ‘my Cas’, but that feels too real.

“Yes,” Cas says. “I still feel…”

Cas looks away, and Dean feels worry slither into his gut.

“This is a win, Cas,” he tells his friend, because it looks like Cas hasn’t got the memo. “It’s okay if you need time to recover. You get that, right?”

“Of course,” Cas says, but he still isn’t looking at Dean.

Sam clears his throat, and Dean looks around, standing up as he sees Sam gesture at him and moving away from the bed.

“You want a bit of peace and quiet, there, Cas?” Sam asks. “Me and Dean, we can go pull a meal together. For you, too, if you want.”

Cas stares at his hands, his brow pinched.

“I don’t require food,” he says. “But thank-you. I...I think I should…”

“You should rest. Get your strength up,” Dean says, having no idea if that even makes any sense for Cas now the spell’s worked on him. “Hey, and I have your journal. If you want that.”

The comments jolts Cas, and his head whips around.

“What?”

“Your journal.” Dean mimes writing, like the issue here might be Cas not knowing the word for ‘journal’. “I found it in your coat, and, you know, it had the note in it for me. So…”

“You took it,” Cas says.

“Well, yeah. But just because that’s when you were out of it, and I thought it might help us work out what was going on. Cas, I told you this already. Before.”

Cas shakes his head and slumps. Dean can’t tell if it’s disappointment or something else.

“You couldn’t read it,” Cas says. “Not most of it. I wrote it in a form of Enochian you don’t know. I doubt many could read it now.”

He looks sad, and Dean thinks of Cas saying how many he slaughtered in Heaven, of Cas telling Hannah how he was the last Seraph, and he thinks how lonely it must be to think you’re the last one to speak your language fully, as a native.

“I could have read it,” he says, and sees Cas’ eyes widen. “I, er, well, I’ve been teaching myself Enochian from books, and it turns out there are some with your dialect in, so, you know…”

He trails off, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck. It feels oddly embarrassing to admit to that. It feels like it makes something about him easier to read.

From behind Dean, Sam sighs.

“Look, I don’t know about Dean, but I’m starved. I’m gonna go dig up some food. Don’t worry, Dean. I can scrape together enough food to make a meal. You stay.”

And Sam’s gone before Dean can worry about it any further.

“You understand Enochian,” Cas says, and Dean turns back to him to see the angel frowning, his head tilted. “Why? Why bother to learn my dialect? Dean, I’m about the only one left who speaks it. There’s no point.”

“What if the point was to understand you?” Dean asks.

That seems to confuse Cas even more. The guy honestly doesn’t seem able to fathom that anyone would care to understand him.

“I don’t understand me,” Cas says. “I don’t see how you can.”

Still, there’s something in his tone that says he’s fretting about an aspect of this, and Dean thinks about how much Cas keeps to himself, how many memories they had no idea would exist.

“Cas, I’m not saying I’m fluent,” he says. “Hell, I can probably make out what’s in the journal, but not well. And don’t worry. I said I could have read it, not that I did. Any secrets you got hidden away in there are safe.”

He can’t tell if that’s making Cas feel better or not.

“You saw enough in my memories,” Cas says.

He looks deflated, and Dean thinks he’s starting to get it.

“You think I’m judging you for anything we saw in there?” he asks. “Cas, if anything, I should be judging myself. I had no idea you went through all that crap. Fuck. You were homeless. How did I miss that?”

“It can be easy to miss things we don’t want to see,” Cas says quietly, almost to himself. He shifts on the bed and meets Dean’s gaze again. “Besides, I didn’t want you to know.”

And that’s got to be at least part of the issue, right? It can’t all be Dean. Cas doesn’t want Dean to know. Of course, that’s probably because he thinks Dean will get angry, or will turn him away, or some other reaction Dean wishes he could say would be out of character.

“The main thing I got from those memories is that I’ve ignored how you feel,” Dean says. “I’ve not let myself think about how things affect you, and I’m sorry.”

Cas nods, but it really doesn’t seem to be going in.

“Yeah,” he says. “So am I.”

There’s silence for a bit, and Dean shuffles his feet. The carpet in here is almost worn through and he thinks they should get Cas to help them pick out a new one. Something deep blue, perhaps, or a warm buttery cream. Something Cas might like.

“I should-” Cas starts.

“You wanna get-” Dean says, and stops. Cas is staring at him, so he picks up the inane comment he’d been making. “You wanna get out of here for a bit?”

They can go shopping. There’s bound to be a shop around somewhere that sells carpets. And other things to make this room nicer. Warmer. Dean keeps seeing that stock-room at the Gas N Sip in his mind, and he needs to dispel it with color and with cosiness and with whatever else Cas needs.

“If that…” Cas says, and swallows, and goes on. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah. Sure,” Dean says. “I’ll just go tell Sam. Okay?”

He spins around and leaves the room a bit quickly, because he wanted Cas back, and he has him, and he feels like he’s screwing all this up. For one thing, he kind of expected Cas to confirm all those feelings of love Dean felt in the memories, and instead he’s just being...Cas. Dean doesn’t know what to do with that.

Sam nods when Dean tells him about the shopping trip, and waves off going with them.

“Nah,” he says, around a mouthful of some sandwich that makes Dean itch to slap it out of Sam’s hand and make a new one, a better one. “You two go and pick out curtains. I’m good here. Think I might get my head down for a bit.”

When Dean gets back to Cas’ room, the door is still open and the room itself if empty. No sign of Cas. No clothes left on the chair over in the corner. No signs of the journal, either, which had been on the bedside table.

Shit.

Cas was not meant to heal up, drop all of that understanding in Dean’s head, and then up and walk.

He can’t have gone far. Dean takes off at a run.

 

*****************

Cas is sitting in the library. He has his coat over one arm, but his feet are still in socks and he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to move.

“Hey, Cas?” Dean asks. “You going someplace?”

“I don’t know,” Cas says, without looking up. “I’m not sure what I’m doing.”

“You, er, you aren’t running away, are you?” Dean asks.

He smiles as he says it, but it’s a weak and pitiful smile and he knows it. He wants to go to Cas, or at least get him to look up at Dean, but he seems to be stuck over here by the door, standing with one hand in his jeans pocket and no fucking clue what to say to make things right.

After everything he’s seen, and everything he now thinks he understands about Cas, he isn’t sure there is anything.

He is very sure he has to try.

“Can we talk?” he asks.

“We are talking, Dean,” Cas says, but it’s dull, as though Cas thinks Dean expects that kind of literal response and is dutifully saying his lines.

“No, I mean really talk.”

Dean pushes away from the door and walks carefully across to Cas, still feeling like the floor might pitch and tilt under his feet. He takes the seat next to Cas and angles it so he’s mostly facing Cas. This doesn’t feel like a conversation that should be had from any distance. He’s let too much distance exist between the two of them already.

Cas doesn’t look up. He just keeps staring down at his coat, over his arm, like he’s trying to summon the energy to put it on.

“Don’t go,” Dean says, because it’s something he should have said before, and hasn’t.

“I should.”

Cas doesn’t seem convinced by what he’s saying. But then, Dean’s come to understand that Cas isn’t sure about a lot of things, not when it comes to being expected to navigate through the choppy waters of one Dean Winchester and the whole human condition.

“No,” he says. “You really shouldn’t. Cas, you should stay right here.”

At that, Cas glances up, his eyes a deep, dark blue. It’s not the same as the look Cas turned on him when Dean told him he had to leave the Bunker, but it’s too close for comfort.

“Why?” Cas asks.

“Why? Why what?”

“Why should I stay? You saw my memories. You...you felt what I felt, what I feel. Why do you still want me around?”

Dean frowns.

“Yeah, I felt that. And it’s crap, Cas. Hell, I should have known how bad you’d have it as a human, and I was so wrapped up in my drama with Sam that I… No. No, I didn’t forget. Not exactly. But I pushed it aside. I pushed you aside. And I know you accepted my apology. I know that. And that’s great of you, Cas. It is. But saying sorry doesn’t make any difference if I just treat you the same way again.”

“You haven’t,” Cas says, and he sounds genuinely confused.

“No, Cas, but if I let you go off now? Just let you walk away? Then I have.”

“You aren’t kicking me out without my powers or any safety, Dean,” Cas says, and he says it as though it should be a reassurance, as though reminding Dean of what he did to Cas back then will make this just fine.

“It’s close enough,” Dean says, finding the words rasp. “In my book, it’s close enough.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Cas says.

Dean opens his mouth to answer, and realizes that was Enochian. And not the kind used in the spells. No, this is the kind he’s really had to dig for, the kind more native to actual angels.

It’s the language Cas used in his journal.

Dean still isn’t sure how far Cas thinks Dean speaks Enochian. To give him the journal, he must know Dean could work it out. He must. And Dean told him he can speak Cas’ dialect. But maybe he’s just said that in his native tongue because it gives Dean a chance to pretend he doesn’t understand, so he can slide away from really committing to what needs saying.

So Dean takes a moment and shapes the sentence in Cas’ tongue, because they’ve spent long enough with the angel being expected to use Dean’s.

“I want you to stay,” Dean says, and uses the version of the word which carries the sense of permanence, of a base. “I want you to feel home,” and he chooses the noun that means safety, shelter and acceptance. “I want you.” And he uses the version of ‘want’ that includes desire.

He sees Cas’ eyes widen.

“Dean,” Cas says, a word he seems at home with no matter the language.

And he lets go of the coat, not looking as it falls to the floor.

“Do you want that?” Dean asks, still in Enochian. “Cas, do you want me?”

Cas stares at him for a long moment, and sits forward, reaching out with his right hand and tracing his forefinger down Dean’s face, from his temple to his jaw. His eyes are reverent.

When Dean half-closes his eyes and leans into the touch, Cas’ lips part, and he brings both hands up to cradle Dean’s head, one carding through his hair and curving around his skull, and the other holding his jaw.

If this is Cas’ only answer, Dean thinks it’s probably clear enough, especially as Cas leans in, his lips only an inch or two from Dean’s.

Dean’s lips tingle, actually tingle, as he waits for a kiss, his breaths warm as they ghost across his own lips.

Cas pauses there, apparently searching Dean’s face. Or maybe making sure he memorises this moment, so it can become a memory he holds as an anchor.

“Yes,” Cas says, in Enochian. “Yes, Dean, I want you.”

And he kisses Dean, and there’s no doubt at all that they’re both right where they’re meant to be.


End file.
